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Comment by war1025 | Hacker News Reader

We cloth diaper too (3 kids, a two and a half year old potty trained for about a year now, and 5 month old twins). Personally, I find disposable diapers to be way more disgusting than cloth. With cloth, you rinse it out and the majority of the gross stuff is down the drain. With disposables, you end up with a garbage can literally full of poop. Its like having a mini pit toilet in your house.

We have also noticed, like you mentioned, that cloth diapers are easier on the babies' skin and makes potty training significantly easier.

For anyone who is reading this and may be interested in cloth diapering: Get some quality covers and then buy a ton of flour sack towels. They make the best inserts. Super absorbent, cheap, and unfolds to a single layer, which means they get cleaner and dry faster.

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Props for doing that. We tried with our twins, but eventually decided cloth diapers are for people with single kids that aren't burnt out.

Ugh. Yeah, I regret deeply buying cloth diapers for my twins. The economics looks better for twins, since you only need like 50% more, but the time premium is higher than expected with twins, so it ended up eating into too much prescious downtime. Worse is we couldn't get them to stop drinking the majority of their fluid intake before bed, and the pee at night required us to use absorbant disposables anyways. In the end I'm not sure they were a net positive investment, even ignoring the higher than expected opportunity cost of havings twins.

"cloth diapers are for people with single kids"

Maybe not for twins, but "one kid at-a-time" is more than doable and the second kid is where the real money savings come in.

Yeah, I meant that by single (English is my second language).

And of course cloth diapers are probably a good idea for twins too, but I just couldn't handle it. There comes a point where you'll give almost anything to get five minutes of free time every now and then.

Sister had twins - I totally get it. Their house was crazy for the first couple years. You do what works ;)

> With cloth, you rinse it out and the majority of the gross stuff is down the drain. With disposables, you end up with a garbage can literally full of poop.

Worth pointing out that just because you use disposables doesn't mean you can't rinse it out / dump into a toilet. We used cloth for 8 months and then transitioned to a daycare that wouldn't let us use them. I still dump all solids into the toilet because I don't want my baby's room to smell like poop 24/7.

Also, if you read the box, most diapers will instruct you that you are supposed to do this, as human waste doesn't belong in landfills.

The thing that grosses me out when I attempt to do that is then the polymer filling stuff gets all wet and nasty. That stuff just weirds me out...

Our twins are currently just breastfed, which means their poop is basically yogurt. So nothing to dump in the toilet yet. I remember we would dump the harder poops out before we threw the diapers away if we were out of town and using disposables.

Disposable diapers are actually a burden on society in many places even beyond the obvious problem of essentially putting sewage in the trash; https://www.nearta.com/Papers/GovernmentDiapers.pdf

> you rinse it out and the majority of the gross stuff is down the drain.

How do you rinse it? What drain?

> Get some quality covers and then buy a ton of flour sack towels. They make the best inserts. Super absorbent, cheap, and unfolds to a single layer, which means they get cleaner and dry faster.

Don't understand this whole paragraph.

Many people have a laundry room (or area) with washer, dryer, and utility sink. For example, see http://www.mlexecutiverealty.com/_account/images/listing/122... .

Taking care of a baby requires specific education. You should not expect to know everything about the topic if you have not researched it.

It is rude to express your confusion this way. As written it implies that the author did not express things well, when it appears instead to be that you are ignorant of the topic and don't feel like doing the research. I'm often that way, but since no one else cares, I don't comment about it.

How is it that you did not think to do, say, a DDG search for "diaper insert", or even better, "diaper insert flour sack"? The first hit for the latter is http://mamanloupsden.com/2014/10/29/whats-deal-flour-sack-to... , which seems quite relevant.

I don’t agree, it was terse but didn’t intend it to be rude, and there is some responsibility to use clear wording without obscure terms or jargon. Raised a child and never heard any of those terms before.

Reminds me of many tech articles here where obscure acronyms are never explained.

Also putting feces down the sink doesn’t sound like a great idea, though maybe it’s fine. No explanation given either way.

You don't put it down the sink, you rinse off the diaper into the toilet.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Baby-Cloth-Diaper-Spraye...

The sink and the toilet connect to a drain pipe within probably 5 feet, so its really not as gross as people tend to think. Also, no matter what you are going to get poop on your hands and wash that off in the sink, so poop is going down the sink either way.

Obviously when the baby is old enough to have well-formed poops, you dump that in the toilet. Otherwise we just rinse them in the sink, put them in a 5 gallon pail, and then wash them in the washing machine every day or two. (More often because of twins)

I've seen people hook up a hose to their toilet and just spray the diaper "into" the toilet, I guess it could also double as a bidet too if you wanted.

Diaper covers are basically the water-proof outer part of the diaper. Then you put cloth inside to handle the absorbing liquid.

For example: https://www.amazon.com/Thirsties-Wrap-Cloth-Diaper-Cover/dp/...

Flour sack towels are thin kitchen towels, I assume named how they are because they are the same material that people used to buy bulk flour in.

The picture is bad, but these are what we bought: https://www.theisens.com/products/flour-sack-kitchen-towel/8...

Basically its a towel a little less than 3 feet on each side. I fold it in half the long way, in half the other way, and then in thirds the original direction. You put that inside of the diaper cover, and then put it on the baby just like a disposable diaper.

When the baby pees, you replace only the cloth part. When they poop and it gets on the cover, you get a new cover as well.

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