Elfnoodles

The cloth diapers we ended up picking for Cory are the traditional Fuzzi Bunz by Mother of Eden. Before I settled on them, I read a lot of reviews and determined that all of the main brands have people who love them and people who hate them, with no clear winner. I ended up with Fuzzi Bunz mostly since they do not rely on velcro – not only does velcro have a tendency to wear out, some people complained that their kid learned how to play with velcro and thus, how to efficiently remove their own diapers. That just seemed like something Cory would do.

However, some of the reviewers of Fuzzi Bunz complain that the sizing and quality is no longer consistent since Mother of Eden started manufacturing them in Mexico instead of the United States. This does, unfortunately, seem to be the case. I have a mix of US- and Mexican-made diapers, presumably since some of the less popular colors I got were older stock. There are indeed noticeable sizing differences. But, since they all still fit, and still consistently leak much less than disposable diapers – hardly at all, in fact – I hadn’t been too worried about that.

What does bother me is that the elastic in the back is now shot on two of the diapers (both of them Mexican-made). One was an oddity: two is starting to be a pattern. Fuzzi Bunz carry a warranty and these diapers are only about 5 or 6 weeks old, so I looked it up. What the warranty says is that it does cover elastic defects for 60 days, but then it specifically excludes shot elastic. Huh?? In other words, if you can find an elastic defect other than it no longer working, they’ll fix it!

That, my friends, is BS. If more of these diapers die out, I’ll be replacing them with a different brand.

Finally, for a diaper pail I got the Mother of Eden “hanging diaper pail,” which is a waterproof cloth bag made out of the same stuff as the diaper shells. There’s not a quality problem with it that I have found, but… it doesn’t work that well. The problem is that, since it’s a large impermeable sack, it accumulates detergent in the washer like nobody’s business and doesn’t rinse out. Furthermore, if you are washing it with the diapers as they intend, they don’t rinse out well either because of it. So I can’t recommend this as a day-to-day solution unless you want to dedicate extra effort to rinsing it each time. It will be nice for traveling, though.

Oh, and for when you need disposables? Get the Pampers instead of Huggies. I didn’t think there would be any difference, but Pampers are much softer. As Thud observed, Huggies evoke the general effect of putting your baby in a hanging file folder. Pampers, not so much.