Sending Cloth Diapers To Your Child's Daycare/Babysitter

Thanks to Farrah to post about this in her blog . She is one of my dear very early customer become friend. A dedicated mom to Breastfeeding and Clothdiapering as well as Baby wearing.

She wrote a great post about Sending Cloth diapers to your child's daycare. This is a typical and very frequently asked and doubted by many newbies in Cloth Diapering,. And I hope Farrah's post will help you to handle it.
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It is not easy to persuade a daycare or babysitter to use cloth diapers on your child. But it really isn't a problem, if you make things a lot easier for them, as easy as using disposable diapers.

However, before you start sending cloth diapers to your child's daycare/babysitter, make sure you are well experienced with diapers usage and handling. It is very important for you yourself to be comfortable with cloth diapering before you can convince other people to cloth diaper your child. This way, you will be able to handle criticism and complaints coming from them.

I have been sending cloth diapers to Adam's daycare from day 1. So let me just share some tips with you :).

1) Send enough CDs for the day.

When Adam was younger, I sent around 6 diapers. Now that he is older, I only need to send 4 diapers:
- 1 for the mid-morning diaper change,
- 1 for the after lunch shower,
- 1 for the late afternoon diaper change,
- 1 for extra.

For the record, I send Adam to the daycare at 8.30am, fresh and showered. And pick him up at 5.45pm. So if your working hours is longer than mine, send more diapers accordingly.

2) Preferably, use hook and loop diapers, i.e. those using the velcro tab, yang macam kasut sekolah budak-budak tuu.. I don't really recommend you sending diapers that use snap buttons to the daycare because it needs the right setting on the snaps to ensure good fitting or you'll end up with a leak.

Remember that it is not necessarily the same person who will put on the diapers on your baby every time. If the daycare keeps changing caregivers then you might end up having to reiterate your instructions every time.

Besides, hook and loop style is the closest to disposable diapers and this would definitely reduce any resistance coming from the daycare.

3) If you're using pocket diapers, pre-stuff them with their inserts.

4) If you're using onesize diapers, pre-set their sizing accordingly.

5) If you're using sized diapers, make sure you use the right diaper size, not too tight, and not too loose. If the diaper is too loose, leaking might happen and people won't like it.

6) Tell the daycare to change your child's diaper every 3-4 hours.

7) IF, you suspect your child's caregiver is a little bit, erm.. slow (plain word=lazy) in changing your child's diapers and begins complaining about 'leaking', you have 2 ways in approaching this problem:

i) The harsh way: Insist on changing your child's diaper every 3 hours.

ii) The soft way (my preferred way): Use highly absorbant diapers, those using hemp or bamboo inserts, or onesize microfiber inserts. This way, the diapers can definitely last a little bit longer, at least for 4-5 hours before the next changing/bath time.

8) Prepare a wetbag, or a plastic bag if you don't have a wetbag yet, that is big enough to keep used diapers. Remember to instruct the daycare to place used diapers inside the wetbag/plastic bag.

9) Now here comes the hardest part - poop handling:

Remember to instruct the daycare NOT to wash the soiled diapers. Your goal is to make them be willing to use cloth diapers on your baby. So make things easier for them.

For breastfed babies' runny poop, tell the daycare to just fold the diaper and put it inside the wetbag.

If the poop is soft, or even hard, just tell them to flush the poop down the toilet, fold the diaper and put it inside the wetbag.

In my case, the caregivers at Adam's daycare would ALWAYS wash Adam's soiled diapers (they spray the poop off the diaper with a water hose). Despite me telling them they can just dump the soiled diapers into my wetbag. The thing is, they're not comfortable keeping dirty poopy diapers inside the bag. I don't want to add more work to them cos I do understand how difficult it is taking care of so many children at the same time.

So the best warkaround to handle this situation is for me to use flushable liners on top of Adam's diapers. I left an instruction to just toss the poopy liner inside the bin, or flush it into the toilet. So there's no need to do any further washing.

10) So if you're using liners, be friendly to our environment and use FLUSHABLE LINERS. Also, make sure you pre-line all the diapers before sending them to the daycare.

And finally, if you really want to cloth diaper your child at the daycare, be serious about it. Don't send any disposable diapers as backups or extras AT ALL because that might give them the impression that you're giving them the option to NOT use the cloth diapers.

I forgot to add that it might be a little helpful if you send yummylicious or gorgeous/cute looking diapers to the daycare for them to drool over hehehehe... I find that the caregivers at the daycare that Adam is attending would always reach out for my cute looking Drybees or those yummy Blueberry hehehe ;P.

Happy cloth diapering!