I’m not crazy. I cloth diaper with twins. I’m a member of the Main Line Mothers of Multiples club and know of at least one member who cloth diapered her triplets.

Cloth diapering has seen some major innovations in the last decades and even the last few years. Safety pins, rubber shorts, most leaks, and even folding… all that can be left in the past.

When it comes to multiples, doing laundry every other day for two babies is not much harder than doing the same for one. And the cost of disposable diapers and wipes for multiple butts, through potty training, is some serious, serious cash.

My cost analysis for twins was something like $5500 over three years to go disposable, or less than $2000-2500 with cloth. Remember, in addition to diapers there’s also the cost of wipes, pail bags, diaper cream, and so on. We did choose to cut ourselves a little slack and go disposable for the first couple of months, when we could go through 20 dipes per day. But because we got a good deal on our cloth dipes, I still expect to clock in under that $2500 figure. That includes everything on the list below, as well as detergent/water/energy costs, over more than three years.

And figuring out your own best cloth diapering practices is a truly satisfying hack. So, however many bottoms you may have to diaper, give it serious consideration before just defaulting to disposables.

There are plenty of pages out there on the topic, but here’s a summary of what I’ve come up with. This post covers the nursery side of things. The laundry room side of the process is a whole other bullet list, and I’ll save that for another day.

–        Diapers I got: Kawaii. www.theluvyourbaby.com. I got 48 of the colored one size dipes. They have a huge sale twice a year and we got our dipes at the sale price. I wound up spending under $300 for 48 dipes, which is an absurdly low price for diapering two kids from 2 months old through potty training. I did have to spend another $100 or so to hack a solution to the occasional soak-through problem I had with their microfiber inners though…

–        My solution was Bamboo and Hemp fleece, which I cut into strips and just fold and insert. These materials are much more absorbent and breathable than microfleece. You can buy pre-made bamboo and hemp inners, but it’s much cheaper to buy the fabric and cut it up. I cut one long 6’ strip, fold it to the length I need, and insert into the liner. No hemming or stitching, they are inners so I don’t care how they look, just care that they are comfy and absorbent.

• Caveat on the bamboo: I prefer the bamboo, but with the bamboo fleece to which I linked, you have to make sure to cut so that the different-textured edging along one edge of the fabric is parallel to your strips. If you don’t, you will get curling on the edges of all your strips, which will decrease coverage in the dipe. Of course, I learned this the hard way.

–        Cloth wipes, I got Osocosy and Bumkins, which are almost exactly the same. Cloth wipes are better for butts than disposable ones, and of course fit in with the environmental and financial stewardship of cloth diapering. Plus, throwing wipes into one receptacle and dipes into another is just annoying.

–        Wipes dispenser. This Oxo one serves us well, it’s sturdy, pops open easily, and cloth wipes are easy to get out of it, one at a time, with one hand.

–        Extra virgin coconut oil. Serves as diaper cream, not that use it much for this; cloth dipes and wipes cut down diaper rash, and the wipe solution below has coconut oil in it which keeps their tender skin feeling nice. Coconut oil is also helpful for cradle cap, works as nipple cream, and supposedly boosts lactation when ingested, along with 101 or so other uses.

–        Homemade wipes solution. There is a huge list of recipes on Eco Crazy Mom; I just use 4 parts water to 1 part coconut oil to ½ part Dr. Bronner’s baby soap.

–        My wipe method: Fold the wipe down from the top and up from the bottom, so edges meet in the middle. Stack in the dispenser while applying wipe solution to your preferred dampness.

–        We do not use a wipe warmer. For the first few weeks, our kids screamed as soon as their diapers came off, so a toasty wipe wouldn’t have made much difference. Once they got used to it, they absolutely love changing time, so the temperature of the wipe still matters not. Wipe warmers are good bacteria breeders and I don’t need to clean things any more often than I already do!

–        Speaking of cleaning, I spray poopy dipes with BacOut before I throw them in the pail.

–        Tall kitchen trash cans with foot pedals are good diaper pails for cloth diapering. We chose this Simplehuman one because it’s nice and sturdy and has a lid lock for once the boys get a bit older. We use Kanga pail liners.

It’s a lot. Everyone has to hack their own favorite process, but I think my process works pretty well. And yes, there’s a lot of startup cost, but in the end we still come out way, way ahead of disposables.