Sierra is a TCO Recipient and mom of two. Sierra originally wrote this post for the TCO blog in 2020.

Hello, I’m Sierra! I’m a mom of two boys. I have a now 3 month old and a 16 1/2 month old. We started cloth diapering as soon as my youngest was born. My toddler had the hardest time in disposables. We could never find something that didn’t leak (especially overnight). We went through tons of different diapers and dealt with way too many rashes. When I got pregnant with my second, I knew I wanted to cloth. Especially with two under two, I knew I’d be saving money. We’re a military family- my husband is a marine, and I’m a SAHM. We didn’t have the funds to fork out a ton to get started and I was bummed we would have to use disposables. And then someone told me about The Cloth Option. I applied and was approved. Before I knew it, there was a package of diapers and inserts on my porch. They sent sooo many options for us to experiment with. We quickly fell in love with pockets, especially for my squirmy toddler. They also provided so much support and information on how to use and care for the diapers. In the beginning we had a little bit of a hard time getting my newborn to fit and not flood the diapers (even newborn). He had really skinny legs and a chunk belly. But, we did it! We fully cloth two kids and love it!

How did you first get started with cloth diapers?

At the time we were living on a military base, Claydon was about four months old, Mackenzie was under two. I had two under two, and I saw a Black military wife whose son was about the same age as Claydon. I asked her about what I thought it was a diaper cover and she told me it was a cloth diaper. I sort of ignored it because I was like, “Ew, I don’t want to deal with poop!” Then a few weeks later I met up with another military mom to buy some clothes and her son was running around in what I thought was a cute Spiderman diaper cover. And she said, “No, that’s his diaper!” What was supposed to be a quick transaction ended up being me staying there for two hours! She broke down cloth for me, and I ended up leaving with some cloth diapers.

I went home and told my husband about it and he said you’re not going to do it! I said, she told me a hundred dollars and you’re set. Then another mom sold me her diapers, like a stash of 20 diapers for around 30 bucks. They were Alvas that she had used on her twins, who were then potty trained. After I got those first cloth diapers, I never bought diapers again! I alternated between my last box of Luvs and the cloth, and I never bought another disposable again.