If you follow me on Facebook or Pinterest, you may have noticed that I have gotten into cloth diapers. Logically, you might assume that I have children.  I don’t, not yet at least.

The dream we’re chasing with our move from Virginia is one of focusing on our family. We made the concerted decision to move somewhere smaller (less traffic, less stress) so that we can adopt some babies and have a more family-centric life. After we move into our new house (details forthcoming, promise), we’re going to start our journey of connecting with an adoption agency and begin the process of becoming parents.

I’m prepared to wait a year or more to be blessed with our first child, but I can’t help but hope that it won’t be that long. I’m slowly getting things together that we’ll need, so that it won’t be a series of frantic, harried Amazon orders. I want to cloth diaper (the Mister is still being convinced) for a number of reasons (health, environment, finances). I was cloth diapered because I was allergic to disposables, and I wonder just how healthy it will be for me to be touching so many diapers (if they’re disposables). Part of getting things together has included me getting cloth diapers…and I’ve been getting them from lots of places- online, stores, other people, and most recently the Grovia warranty returns bag.

My (mostly) plan is to sew a lot of my own diapers. I can sew, I enjoy sewing, and (most excitingly) I’m going to have a sewing room at the new house (See? Details!).  But as I’ve only made two shells, I’m going to augment that with purchased diapers. Which led me to Grovia (and some other brands)…Grovia makes really nice diapers (they come in lots of different types). I follow them on Facebook as well as some of their discussion/support groups. Last week, I saw that they had their Warranty Return bags for sale on their website. The idea with these bags are that they have a good warranty on their products, so if the elastics relax too soon, or a snap breaks, they will replace it for you. But what to do with all of those returned diapers? Turns out they sell them to craftalicious people like me.

My Grovia Surprise bag arrived today (squeeee!), and as I had heard, of the 11 diapers in it, 11 had relaxed elastics. I would normally be pretty apprehensive about replacing elastics in a reusable cloth diaper- but after making diapers ‘from scratch’, opening up the leg casing and changing out the elastic doesn’t seem as daunting as it might. I’ll take some photos of when I do it and post my experience with bringing them back to life.

I’ll give them a little soak in bleach water for a bit prior to all of this to make sure they’re good to go. The nice thing about these is that they are covers or shells- rather than a diaper with the soaker inserts permanently attached, the absorbent parts snap out for washing and drying, which is less tough on the diapers- and lets them last longer.

I know many people are very anti-cloth diapering. Anytime I mention it, most people try to convince me that it won’t work…and maybe it won’t. But I definitely want to try it.

What thoughts, questions, or advice do you have about cloth diapering?