Up until recently, the hardest challenge I faced with cloth diapering was keeping my toddler daughter dry at night. Her usual double or triple stuffed bumGenius 4.0 wasn’t doing the trick anymore. We ended up with Thirsties Duo Fitted diapers with an extra microfiber insert and Thirsties hemp insert under a Thirsties size large cover. (When super stuffed the Duo Fitteds didn’t fit under a Size 2 Duo cover anymore). Unfortunately, those diapers really took a beating. Apparently toddler pee really takes it out of those beautiful plush Thirsties fitteds. Now that our daughter is mostly night time trained she wears trainers to bed and even those are getting really tight.
But then our son was born and around four months we began having serious nighttime diaper issues. He is a heavy wetter like I’ve never seen. It wasn’t just leaks that were the problem. He also woke up and refused to go back to sleep because he felt wet. Our usual bumGenius 4.0’s didn’t work. Neither did Thirsties Duo Fitted size 1. Then we added Joey Bunz Premium inserts to our stash. These stemmed the tide for a while but I quickly concluded that pocket diapers were no longer a good night time choice for us. Sometimes they even failed during the day, such as our unfortunate foray into FuzziBunz territory.
Eventually only a Duo Fitted with a Joey Bunz Premium insert had any hope of lasting him through the night. But he was still waking up feeling wet.
Enter stay dry doublers. I started adding a bumGenius Stay-Dry Doubler to his night time diapers. Some nights he actually went all the way through with the same diaper. (He didn’t sleep all night, but that is another issue for another time.) But yikes, was he drenched in the morning and the smell would burn my eyes as I took the diaper off. The Stay-Dry Doubler did feel damp by morning, but at least his bottom wasn’t dripping like before.
After doing tons of research I came up with a few other possible solutions to our nighttime woes:
Flip insert, hemp insert (We already owned some larger Joey Bunz Premium inserts) in a Hiney Liney cover with the special snap in Liney.
Baby Kicks One-Size Organic Fitted
Sustainablebabyish Snapless-Multi Fitted Cloth Diapers
EcoPosh Recycled Organic One-Size Fitted Pocket Cloth Diaper
We have tried all of the above except Ecoposh, due to the expense. I did consider going to disposables at night, as much as I hated the thought. Disposables every night over the course of a couple of years could cost more than a few high quality nighttime fitted diapers. But when we used traditional disposables (a combination of Huggies and Pampers) during our post-Sandy power outage, we had even worse night time leaks. The problem was finding which cloth diapers did the job in our situation, without spending a lot of money on failed attempts.
Stay Tune for my reviews of our nighttime attempts in Part 2.
