Nap and night time diapering

This months cloth diaper circle meeting focused on night and nap time diapering. When baby is small their bladder isn’t too big and can’t hold an unruly amount of urine. They also tend to sleep for shorter periods of time so you don’t have to wake them up to change their diapers. Once they get a bit bigger, and start sleeping for longer periods of time, diaper absorbency becomes a real issue and finding a diaper that will hold 4, 8, or 12 hours of urine can be a challenge.

The styles of diapers that I have found to work best for longer wear time are fitted diapers. Fitted diapers are made of completely absorbent material with no waterproofing layer. They either snap or velcro on and require a cover of some sort. Fitteds generally have more absorbent material than other diapers and are able to hold 12 hours of urine from my twins (even my tummy sleeping boy)! I like to top our fitted diapers with a wool cover. For some reason I let wool intimidate me for WAY too long. It’s really not difficult. I’ll be posting about wool care very soon on a post all it’s own.

Other night time options that have worked for us but aren’t quite so bullet proof as a fitted with a wool cover are;

-Two flats and a wash cloth with a cover. I like to fold two flannel receiving blankets or one blanket and one bird’s eye flat. I tend to fold the bird’s eye flat (since snappie fasteners grab that better than some of my blankets) as the out side fold. I use a variation of the origami fold that makes the legs a bit less bulky but you could also just roll the extra flat around the leg area up a bit. Then I pad fold the second flat and lay it in the wet zone. I top that with a wash cloth folded to fit and a fleece liner next to baby’s skin. Fasten it on and throw a cover on it making sure all the material is tucked into the cover to prevent leaks.

-Use your good old pocket diapers and stuff with a hemp prefold and a microfiber insert on top of the prefold. The microfiber will grap fluid quick while the hemp will absorb a bit slower but will hold on to much more volume. You can always add a layer of wash cloth to this combo too!

Problems I have had in the past when trying to get enough absorption all boil down to overstuffing. Once my little ones out grew the absorption of our AIOs (all in ones) I started adding layers to the AIOs. This created gaps at the legs and belly. Needless to say we had leaks. I have also over stuffed pocket diapers resulting in the same gaps and leakage. I hope this info helps you to find a nighttime solution! If you don’t want to buy more diapers and your current nighttime diaper is leaking, comment below with your current diaper and what materials you have to work with and I’ll trouble shoot with you!