It’s difficult to maintain new hobbies in the early days of parenting, but cloth diapering can become pleasantly addictive. Do you love the cloth diapering experience, toilet dunking and all? We did.

For us, the thrill of experimenting with different styles, brands and laundering techniques was fascinating enough to begin this blog and devote a significant portion of our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide to cloth diapering. Have you crossed into the cloth-diapering-as-a-hobby phase yet? Take our short Cloth Diapering Quiz to find out.

1. You discuss cloth diapers

a. Rarely and only with people who ask about them.
b. With people who are obviously new parents.
c. With anyone, including complete strangers in their mid-seventies who try to avoid eye contact while backing away.
d. On your blog, in your book, and on your public access T.V show, “The Real Poop on Cloth.”

2. You constantly check your baby’s cloth diaper

a. To ensure that she’s comfortable.
b. Just to admire the snaps and elastic between changes.
c. Because you love flaunting the adorable fabric patterns to onlookers.
d. Because you’re looking forward to the next diaper change.

3. In your cloth diaper collection you have

a. A dozen used prefolds and about five simple covers.
b. Some of each type of cloth diaper along with cloth wipes.
c. More diapers than your child can possibly wear.
d. Cloth diapers in every size, allowing your child to avoid toilet training until his teen years.

4. You use cloth diapers because

a. You are perfectly happy laundering diapers every week if it saves you the 3am supermarket trips to buy Pampers.
b. You relish the eco-rightousness you experience while driving by landfills.
c.  You would rather spend thousands of dollars on eco-friendly baby spa treatments (or organic applesauce) than disposable diapers.
d. All of the above.

If you answered mainly A and B, beware! You may quickly move into the deeper levels of cloth diapering devotion as the months tick by.

If you answered mainly C and D, welcome! There are many, many of us who are already card carrying members of the cloth diapering fan club. Stick around for a whole month of posts devoted to the art of cloth diapering. (And even a giveaway or two!)

Did your baby sleep in a drawer or a cardboard crib? (The latter item really does exist and is pictured below.) Did you even have a nursery or did you simply pull baby into bed with you? Did you manage to outfit your baby’s nursery entirely with hand-me-downs or gear from Freecycle?

Of course having a minimalist nursery (or none at all) isn’t the only way to go green, but there’s so much pressure to gear up that it’s nice to know how people manage to creatively raise their babies without all the newest gadgetry. In our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, we try to share a variety of money-saving options for going green with baby, but our favorite is to buy less and buy used.

My son’s nursery wasn’t exactly spartan, but most of its furnishings were either given to me or purchased secondhand (and that includes his cloth diapers). When we saw just how little he used some of the items we thought we “had to have,” we were thoroughly happy that we’d stuck with used gear. I’m sure we could have sold all of it for the same price we paid, but we preferred to pass it onto another local family who had read our book and was striving to get all their gear used.

What creative things did you do to simplify your nursery? Did you even have a nursery? Were there items you eliminated from your baby registry or did you opt to buy some things used?

We had no intentions of sharing our small full size bed with a newborn, but fatigue quickly convinced us to co-sleep. My son’s nursery sat untouched for the first few months of his life, as he either slept in the sling or in bed with us. Any other attempts were encountered with hours of shrill tea kettle shrieks that drove us to comply with his terms.

With our daughter, we were thrilled to borrow a co-sleeper from friends. We blissfully imagined having the bed to ourselves while our newborn snoozed safely nearby. In the end, my daughter utterly refused to be anywhere except right up against me while she slept. We found this out after breaking the co-sleeper while setting it up and sending it back to the company for repairs that cost just as much as the item itself.

If I had known we were going to co-sleep I may have been tempted to buy gear that my babies would have refused to use. We transitioned them to a secondhand crib at around five months, so the nursery did get plenty of use.

Did you use your co-sleeper? Did you keep a bassinet or a moses basket in your bedroom, or did you put your infant to sleep in a traditional crib? (If so, how did you handle all those night feedings?) Were you blessed with a newborn who enjoyed sleeping for long stretches in a separate space from you?

Should you rip up the rug in baby’s nursery, ship it off to the landfill, and replace it with sustainably grown bamboo hardwoods? Or would it be better to steam clean the thirty year old orange shag carpet and incorporate the color scheme into a homemade quilt? How do you balance your environmental ideals with aesthetic desires and budget restraints? Has anyone encountered this very dilemma?

In our old home, one of our children ended up in a carpeted room while the other spent her babyhood a nursery with hardwood floors. If I had a limitless budget, I suppose we would have donated the carpet to a charity and put in wood floors throughout, but the recycler in me couldn’t allow a perfectly usable rug to be dumped into a landfill. (Even though I know carpets are much less healthy in a home environment than hardwoods.) Did you struggle with issues like these while you prepared for baby?

In The Eco-nomical Baby Guide,we share that we felt pressured to purchase baby-oriented gizmos to be “prepared” for the transition to motherhood. When our babies actually arrived, we realized that no amount of gear could compensate for grueling work of caring for a newborn. Life wasn’t a hardship because we didn’t own wipe warmers, it was hard because living without sleep and showers for extended periods of time was an absolute shock.

In the months before my baby arrived, Rebecca’s input helped me bypass the baby aisle and look to consignment stores and craigslist. My husband and I also repurposed what we already had to outfit the nursery. In the end we purchased only one new piece of new furniture–a combination dresser and changing table from Ikea—and ended up with a beautiful nursery. It was outfitted with a used rocking chair with homemade seat covers, (which honestly turned out to creak annoyingly every night from 3-5am….) homemade curtains, a solid maple secondhand crib, a used boppy with a new cover, and art given to us at our baby shower. Stacks of gently used pre-folds purchased from a diaper service and a dozen secondhand diaper covers filled the shelves as we waited for baby.

And how much did all that cost? We spent less than a thousand dollars on my son’s entire first year..and relished every dime that we set aside for later. (Not to mention all the packaging that was saved by buying used instead of new.) We both sometimes reflect on baby gear that we could have splurged on, but at the time it was also fun to see just what we could live without.

So what all did we pass up? New baby clothes, a wipe warmer, a bottle sterilizer, lots of disposable diapers (although we did use them at night), and much, much more. What did we buy used? Almost everything!

What did you cross off your registry list and what did you buy used for baby? Did friends and family support your decision to limit your purchases? Did you even have a baby nursery or get creative with another room in your home?

I was sure we would simply slip our infant into a sink full of bubbles and save a large hunk of plastic from entering the landfill. When we found the kitchen sink bath to be far trickier than anticipated, my husband insisted on buying a baby tub.

Of course, now I realize that gently used infant tubs are everywhere! I do actually wish we would have searched for one while I was pregnant because I was too crazily exhausted to seek out anything other than food and showers in the months after I gave birth.

If I ever did buy a tub, I do think the Spa Baby Upright Baby Eco Tub is rather clever. It is made out of 100% recycled plastic without polycarbonate, bisphenol-A, or paint. Although it claims to be usuable for newborns to 10 month olds, I’m not sure how easily baths would go on either end of that spectrum.

Did you live without a baby tub? Do you have any tricks for sink baths? Did you end up just using the full sized tub with some sort of insert?

This month we’ll be exploring how to outfit a green nursery with high quality baby gear on a budget. Of course, our favorite green strategies involve those old school R’s: reduce, recycle and reuse. But it can be tough to score all secondhand baby gear if you are the first one of your friends and family to have a child. You may end up being showered with so much loot that it’s hard to find your way out from under the pile of ribbons. If that’s the case, heading off to the consignment shop is a bit futile until your child grows out of all those gifts.

On the other hand, if you’re the last one to welcome a baby, herds of relatives and friends may be thrusting their gently used Boppy pillow and Ergo Carriers into your life. You may even be slightly bummed out that you won’t be unwrapping a single new toy, as you have grocery bags full of wooden cars stored in the basement. (Note to readers, Rebecca and I wackily loved all things used and never had the urge to purchase new gear. This may seem weird, but it’s true.)

I have to say that I belong to both parts of the hand-me-down system. We supply expecting friends with deliveries of sturdy secondhand cloth diapers and tiny denim overalls, most of which we bought used. But my daughter will probably never own a piece of new clothing as we have endless tubs of beautiful girl’s clothes handed down to us by my four nieces. It’s fun to be on both ends of the cycle!

So are you the one handing down the goods or are you receiving the secondhand baby gear? Are you buying secondhand gear online and hoping to stumble into some gear exchanges later on? Do you prefer to buy new items for your first child and save them for your future children? Do you loan out gear between the births of your children and ask people to return it?

January is a great month for reorganizing your bathroom or decluttering the kitchen counters but I remember that both my pregnancies spurred my (limited) organizational tendencies into overdrive. At the time, our house was a thousand square feet and we wanted to evaluate how we used every inch in the days before our babies arrived.

But instead of rushing out to buy hundreds of dollars of bins, shelves, and baskets to hold our stuff, we started with what we had. (This is mostly due to our green ideals, but our tightwad tendencies were a factor as well.) So where do you start if you are overwhelmed, without an organizational system, and pregnant? With tiny, tiny steps.

Start small. It gave me great happiness to attack the medicine closet or a spice cabinet. I simply pulled out everything, tossed it into a box, and was very selective about what we put back in. Having these small, but really important areas organized spurred my motivation to move onto the next zone in my home that was driving me crazy. (We are currently living in a much bigger home and I am not pregnant, but I had the pleasure of sorting through my medicine cabinet and bathroom shelves last week. I still have to open them regularly just to admire the neat, labeled pull-out tubs made out of empty kleenex boxes. One is for cold and flu medicine, one for first aide, etc. Order, even in small spaces, is bliss when life with kids is such chaos.)

Play Furniture Tetris. A friend of mine with a similarly sized home coined this phrase and I loved it instantly. For awhile we kept baby in our bedroom and gave up the nursery altogether. Then we shifted the office contents into the living room and moved everything about once more. We were constantly asking ourselves how to repurpose what we already had. Could the baby’s dresser also work as a changing table? Could our small shelf be a spot to stash towels in the bathroom?

Recycle for profit. Taking boxes of rarely read novels to the used book store or selling our loot on craigslist earned us the money to buy what we really wanted for our home. Plus we scored space on our shelves to display what we really love.

When in doubt, donate. Even if I think I just might someday use that ugly turquoise fish pitcher, I’ve learned to toss it in the donation pile. I feel it improves my personal thrift store karma and of course it scores us a lovely tax write-off as well. Also, by recycling something I loathe we recover precious household space.

When I was in the midst of parenting a newborn, any change in our environment took approximately sixteen times longer than it normally would have. But when I was pregnant, I could organize three cupboards of tupperware in less than fifteen minutes. (I so wish that crazy organization drive was still with me today!) Where are you in the parenting spectrum? What do you plan on being able to organize this month? Stay tuned for upcoming posts on tackling your closet…maternity jeans and all!

This is our third holiday season here at Greenbabyguide.com. Our first Christmas posts had a following of a dozen readers, most of them family members. Since then we’ve published our book, The Eco-nomical Baby Guide, and increased our web traffic to about 50,000 unique users each month. Whew!

Despite our modest fame, nothing much has changed for our families. This morning we finished untying our fabric gift bags and have spent the day playing, snacking and reading.

After the crush of preparation and anxiety, there is such relief in just sitting in our toy-strewn living room and enjoying the kids. They aren’t sporting BPA-free bibs or chubby cloth diaper bums this year, but are rapidly leaving babyhood behind at 5 years and 2 years old.

For all of you today, I hope that you have the chance to smell the top of your baby’s head, to get a nap, and to maybe just enjoy this incredibly fleeting (and grueling) era of parenthood. May your milk supply be incredible, your cloth diapers be absorbent, your laundry be minimal, and your sleep tonight be long and luxurious. Most of all, I hope you celebrate yourself as a hard working, green-minded parent!

New moms are acclimating to sleep loss, post-birth bodies, and a challenging role of parenting a newborn. They deserve some lovely holiday gifts. (And casseroles, and free babysitting, and any other support you can lend!)

Baby Slings. I thought carriers were unnecessary before my baby arrived, but when I learned that I could slip my colicky baby into a Maya Wrap Sling and he would fall asleep in minutes, I was hooked. Beyond the soothing effects of baby carriers, they are infinitely practical. It’s suddenly possible to vacuum, cook dinner, and go for a walk without waking the baby! Many women love Hotslings as well. If you’re looking for a budget gift, there are even free patterns online for sewing a homemade sling that you can craft yourself.

Ergo carriers. These sturdy carriers were built with your back in mind and balance the baby weight more centrally. Ergo Carriers adapt from newborns to toddlers and can be used as a front or back carrier. In addition to comfort, I loved the zip pockets to tote keys or lip balm when we headed out the door for a walk. They are a bit pricey, but you can often find gently used Ergo Carriers at consignment shops or on craistlist.

Flannel pajamas. Many new mothers can attest to the fact that whole days are spent lounging in bed with a newborn. Elastic waistbands are especially friendly for a postpartum waistline and it’s nice to tuck baby against soft flannel while rocking. Think about getting a button down style if she is breastfeeding.

Stainless Steel Water Bottle. To keep a mother’s milk supply at maximum capacity, she’ll need to be hydrating all day long. We love the Nathan Stainless Steel flip straw water bottle and found it to be incredibly convenient. (It flips up to sip while walking or driving, fits in most car cup holders, and is easy to clean. It also comes with four extra straws for those days when the one straw you had is hiding somewhere in the depths of your dishwasher.

Healthy snacks. The hunger of nursing a newborn made my pregnancy hunger seem trivial. I was eating all day and all night long to keep up with the calories that were going to my baby. Handy, healthy snacks that can be munched in the middle of the night are a great gift. Why not some Roasted Edamame for protein and some Kashi TLC cookies as a healthy-ish treat? (Or make her a batch of “milk making cookies” using this recipe!)

Although the above items can easily be tucked into a gift bag, I can’t emphasize enough the gift of human support. If you can possibly deliver a meal or hold the baby for a few hours while the mother naps, everyone will benefit. Why not load the dishwasher or throw some laundry in the dryer while you’re at it?

Are you a new mother? Do you welcome support or do you wish people would let you just be with your baby? What are you hoping to receive this holiday season?

Also, the winner of our Charlie Banana Cloth Diaper giveaway is Sascha W. Congratulations Sascha!