My due date is next week, so I really could go into labour at any time. This week I finally “prepped” all my cloth diapers and finished getting the baby’s room somewhat organized.
“Prepping” is to prepare your cloth diapers for use. When you first buy them, they need to be washed several times to obtain their absorbency. Natural fibers especially (cotton, hemp) need to be washed 3-5 times to strip them of their natural oils so that the diapers will absorb liquid quickly and effectively. I’ve got a variety of newborn sized cloth diapers that I’m excited to start using.
It is important to wash the diapers with a little bit of detergent and to fully dry them in between each washing. (*Make sure you use a cloth-diaper approved detergent! This is very important!*)
If you are using prefolds, you will notice that they start to fluff up and quilt up more with each washing.
Prefolds and fitted diapers that are made of cotton, hemp, or bamboo will need a bit more prepping (I would say 4-6 washes) than diapers that are made with polyester which is synthetic such as the microfibre inserts common in pocket diapers (which are probably good to go after 2-3 washes).
Since I have a variety of diapers, I washed all of them 4x so far.
I have 12 newborn-sized organic cotton prefolds, and I could see them transform from flat thin pieces of fabric into fluffy quilted absorbent pads the more they were washed and dried. They might need a few more washes to reach their FULL absorbency, but they should be good enough for my newborn for now since babies poop so much during the first couple of days that I will be changing him very frequently anyway!
In preparation for the meconium (if you don’t know what that is, I’ll leave it up to you to look it up rather than getting into the poopy details!), I’ve got a roll of flushable bio-soft liners ready to go. They will make it easy to just flush the poop down the toilet until the meconium stage has passed. After that, I won’t have to worry about rinsing poop or anything out of the diapers because I will be breastfeeding and the breastfed poop is washable and water soluble! I know some people are nervous to start cloth diapering their newborn from day 1 because of the meconium, so I will let you know how it goes.
I didn’t cloth diaper my daughter right from the start so cloth diapering a newborn will be new for me! More on that another day 
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