My Experience with BumGenius Diapers

Upon thinking about reviewing my experience using BumGenius diapers (& FuzziBunz Diapers - will post soon) I realized that I need to, in the future, post a general blog regarding my over-all experience with cloth diapering my son.

I knew I wanted to cloth diaper since before I got pregnant with my son, so I had 9+ months to research diapers. At first, my thought was I could find a pattern & make my own while I was pregnant & they'd be done by the time I gave birth. Sure, if that was the ONLY thing I had to do while pregnant, I could have made all the diapers he'd need. But, alas, it was not. ;) And thus began my search for the perfect cloth diaper.

At first I was CRAZY about the BumGenius AIO (All-In-One). Here are the initial pros that swayed me to purchase 2-dozen of these in first place:

• It's adjustable so I could purchase 2-dozen or so & they'd last until my son was out of diapers.
• They have the liners sewn in & diaper cover sewn on (hence all-in-one) so I didn't have to waste time assembling the diaper.
• The liners are organic cotton, so I knew they'd be safe against my son's baby-sensitive skin.
• They used snap closures. After vast amounts of research & reading reviews on snaps v. hook and loop (Velcro), I decided against hook and loop because a huge number of people who opted for hook and look closure for one-size diapers were disappointed in how quickly they wore out & many ended up buying snaps & a tool to attach snaps & retrofitted their diapers after the hook & loop closures stopped working in order to get more life out of them.

For the first year or so, the only issue I had with cloth was my son had diaper rash caused by a yeast infection so I began running bleach through the second wash cycle to kill any bacteria. After the first year I started to notice spots of wear, mainly along the edge where the elastic is. Then where the liners are sewn to the diaper, especially at the corners. And finally the lining themselves. Eventually all of these worn areas developed holes that have been gradually getting bigger & bigger as time goes on. The elastics are pretty much shot. Thankfully my son hasn't had any serious blow-outs. Several of the diapers have lost 1 or 2 snaps (there are a total of 4 on each diaper, 2 on each side), but so far only 1 diaper has been rendered useless (because it lost both snaps on 1 side).

I'll be honest, I never wrote to the company to complain that these diapers are falling apart. I may in the future, & if I do I'll share that correspondence. I have not been impressed with how these diapers have held up. I was hoping to consign them once my son was done with them & make a little bit of money back, but I'm just going to have to toss them. I feel less guilty about tossing two dozen cloth diapers, however, as opposed to the guilt from what would have amounted to nearly 9,000 disposable diapers if I hadn't gone the cloth-diaper route. (365 days/year x 8 diapers/day x 3 years = 8,760 diapers)

I always followed the washing instructions & line-dried the diapers 99.9% of the time; these diapers have seen the inside of a dryer less than a dozen times. So there's really no excuse for them to be practically falling apart now - the second photograph is of the worst diaper. It has gaping holes all along the elastic, along the liner edge, & the liner itself is falling off.

Over-all, good concept. Not happy with the out-come 2 1/2 years later though. Wouldn't recommend based on our experience.