Traveling with Cloth

Over the holiday we took a road trip to see my in-laws in Baton Rouge. We were only there for about four days, but since it's too far to go for a weekend we took a couple of days off from work and made the drive.

Now, the last time we drove to BR, Julia was 8 weeks old and the car was baby Ambien for her. Then, she didn't sleep at night for the next few nights.

This trip, we weren't quite sure what to expect, but she did great (at least until the drive home). However, she wasn't big enough to fit into cloth diapers when we last visited. I had considred using disposables for all or just the driving portion of the trip.

So, I bought two packages of the natural, green disposables (seems like a contradiction, huh?) and made sure all the diapers were clean Tuesday night before we left. That night we put her in a sposie so we wouldn't have any dirties to leave behind. To say the sposie did not meet the challenge of overnight is an understatement. Poor baby had leaked and her clothes and bedding was soaked. Somehow she slept right on through it all though. As I went to put a new sposie on her that morning my mind was made up. We were taking the cloth diapers with us and we were just going to make it work.

And, that's what we did.

I packed about 12 diapers and we had a fresh clean one on her when we left. We also took the few dirties from daycare that day with us to wash. We kept the dirties in the car and made sure we had the large wet bag/ pail with us.

My mother in law has a front loading washer and dryer so it took a bit of creativity to do the wash, but they came out clean (enough) and I made sure to do a bleach cycle once we returned home to be sure they were sanitized.

It was a bit challenging not having the diaper sprayer, but with the help of some plastic ware we made do. And, we had a happy baby in her cute, and well fitting cloth diapers for the whole visit. I'd definitely call that a success!

This weekend we are headed to a family reunion and I plan to do the same routine except for the taking dirties with me. My husband will be home and driving down for the day on Saturday so he'll be able to do a small load on Friday.

Have you traveled with cloth? Any tips or tricks?