Cloth Diapers, especially at Daycare

 Do you use cloth diapers?  We do...I love them, they have saved us so much money and are not that much extra work.  An extra load or two of laundry a week but luckily for me we have fancy indoor plumbing so I just throw them in the washer at night, hang them up in the morning, and have clean dry diapers for the next day.   

As far as sizing and type goes I started out with about 20 Best Bottom snap in diapers that I bought used from a friend and 6 Baby Goal pocket diapers that I got from my baby registry.  It was perfect, maybe 4 or 5 more diapers than I needed but that wasn't a bad thing...until Little Dude decided to grow super fast and be in the 99th + percentile for height and weight for his entire life...now he has effectively outgrown the Best Bottom diapers so I had to make a decision...buy more of the bigger size cloth diapers or make the switch to primarily using disposable diapers.   

I decided that since we would be using diapers for at least another year to look into more bigger cloth diapers and decided on Alva Baby pocket diapers and just a couple of weeks into using them I am in love...I bought 11 Alva Baby diapers taking our total count of diapers that fit to 17, which is perfect for where we are right now.  I am washing diapers every 3 days, and the Alva Baby diapers fit great with room for growth.   

As far as daycare goes, I've found cloth diapers to be even easier than disposable ones.   When we were at my mom's we had to use disposable and I had a hard time keeping track of how many they had at daycare/when I needed to buy more.  But having cloth means that I just send enough for a day every day and don't have to worry about it.  It's easy for my daycare provider because they just throw them in the wet bag and send them home.   When I get them home I throw the pee diapers in the washer and dump the solids out of the diaper into the trash, do a quick rinse in my toilet if the solids don't dump out but I use a bamboo liner that is flushable so usually all of the solids dump straight out.   

Do you use cloth diapers?  Have you considered using them?   I think the most important thing is finding a wash routine that works for you.  

Weaning...ish...during COVID

 Little Dude is over 1 now which means that food is now supposed to be his primary form of nutrition with breastmilk simply being a supplement.   Since we have had so many issues with Little Dude not drinking his milk at daycare we decided to stop sending milk to daycare and to wean off of the pump.  

I think doing this during the crazy COVID environment made me a little nervous, what if one of us was exposed to COVID and Little Dude needed the extra immunities from me to keep himself healthy? But in the end I decided that since he is still breastfeeding directly that it was the best option for us.  I hope that Little Dude continues to breastfeed through the next 10ish months until at least his 2nd birthday and possibly extended beyond that in accordance with the WHO recommendations but I am so glad that we were able to make it this far so I'm just going to do my best to provide him with the best nutrition available.  

Sippy Cups

 How do you pick a sippy cup for your child?    At his 1 year doctor appointment Little Dude's doctor suggested that we cut him off of bottles sooner rather than later but keep breast feeding as long as we wanted because Little Dude already has so many teeth.  

So I went shopping for sippy cups...

We already had 1 straw cup, 1 silicone spout sippy cup, and 2 360 cups that we were using for water but I didn't know what to get for milk.   

I stood in the isle of the store for a solid 20 minutes googling my options and trying to figure out what to get.   In the end I decided to get 4 360 style cups for milk and 2 straw cups for water to send to daycare and that we could have 2 sippy cups per day of milk and rotate day by day...

Now we are down to 1 sippy of milk and 1 of water per day and I am in the process of weaning off of pumping because Little Dude isn't really drinking his milk and I can't help but wonder if I should switch his milk to a straw cup ... 

So what do you think?  How do you choose a sippy cup?