Yay Natalie! Thanks for sharing your experience! I figured it up at one point--by the time I had been using cloth for 5 months, the diapers had paid for themselves. The initial expense of buying the diapers was made up for by the amount of money I was saving by not having to buy as many disposable diapers. I don't cloth diaper my oldest at night (he is a super-soaker), but I do my daughter (she's a much lighter wetter than he is). There are cloth diaper makers out there who make thick and very absorbent fitted diapers specifically for night-time, and I've been using those with a fleece cover with my daughter. Most nights the outside is dry, sometimes a little damp, but not soaked.

I haven't invested in any cloth trainers yet for my son (he's been really tough in the potty training category, but that's a story for another blog), but I probably will when he gets more into the mindset of using the toilet. :(

I used cloth diapers on both of my boys - even when I didn't have a washing machine for 3 months. I rinse out the wet ones, then tossed them in the tub to "drain", when the boys take their baths I put the wet ones in the laundry basket. The dirty ones come clean easier if you let them soak in the toilet for a little while, and rubber gloves work great if you don't want to touch the dirty ones.  After dunking the dirty ones in the toilet to flush all the poop, I rinse them out in the sink just to help with what's left in the cloth, then toss them in the tub too until night time. I wash towels and undies every day, so very seldom do I have dirty diapers laying around.  I used disposable at night though, so I wasn't washing sheets every day, though for our oldest one I did use cloth at night for the first 2 or 3 months, until I decided his cloth diapers just weren't staying in place at night and was tired of washing crib sheets every day.  Now that Tyler is potty training I use a cloth like training pant, cloth on the inside and rubber/plastic on the outside.  I had a lot of people tell me I was nuts for using cloth diapers, but I felt the same way about the money issue, and since I'm a stay at home mom, every penny counts right now and has counted for the past 5 years.  With Cole (my oldest) I went so far as to make his cloth diapers, instead of buying them. Tyler wasn't so lucky, he had store bought ones.  I'm glad we went with cloth, I'm pretty sure it saved us a couple hundred dollars if not more over the 3 year diaper period, just don't know where that money is today!!!  Power to the cloth diaper!!!!

While some people still do the wet pail, I think most people who cloth diaper these days do the dry pail method. I have a lidded trashcan with a pail liner (like the ones here) that I keep them in for about 2 days until I wash. The smell is surprisingly less than the smell I get from the trashcan with disposables in it. The poopy diapers get dumped into the toilet and then sprayed with Bac-Out to help cut out the smell and start breaking down anything left behind. The wet diapers just go straight into the can. I do have to make sure that I wash every couple of days or else they start to smell like ammonia. When it's time to wash, I pull the pail liner out with the diapers inside, dump in the diapers and throw in the liner, and wash them all together.

A really GREAT resource for anyone looking into cloth diapering is The Diaper Jungle: http://www.diaperjungle.com.... They've got some really great information there. Another great place to chat with moms who cloth diaper is http://www.diaperswappers.c....

Thanks srfblue! I've been thinking about using cloth diapers, too, but I haven't started my "research." What do you do with the diapers between changing and washing them in the laundry?