Below is our response to this recent article in the Post Dispatch. The article was written to explain the problems that poor parents have trying to afford diapers for their little ones. At one point in the article, the author made the statement that “CLOTH IS NOT AN OPTION”, so we decided we would reach out to her in hopes of educating her on why cloth might just be the perfect option for families of all income levels.
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Hello Nancy Cambria,
I hope you are doing well. I read your article in the Post on April 10th and was surprised, like many other readers, that your article didn’t really touch on the growing presence of cloth diapering across America as a viable option for families. We wanted to write to help educate on why “cloth IS an option”.
We run the cloth diaper delivery service in the St. Louis region and we find cloth to be an appealing option for many families across the financial spectrum. While weekly pricing for our service is similar to that of disposable, our babies tend to potty train from 6-12 months earlier. This is part of the added savings while using cloth. Our service delivers a weekly supply of diapers directly to the customer – alleviating the worry of running out or having to wash their own diapers.
As our business has grown, we are dedicated to education about cloth diapering and understanding the role cloth can play in our community. We offer free monthly classes at Kangaroo Kids and at the Birth and Wellness Center in O’Fallon Missouri, where we teach parents how to use cloth and how to home wash. We work closely with Cotton Babies and do all their washing for the Share the Love program here in St. Louis. We also donate to cloth diaper banks like The Rebecca Foundation and Giving Diapers, Giving Hope. We provide various cost-efficient options for our clients and we sell our overstock cloth pre-folds at a very reasonable, discounted rate. Even without immediate access to washers and dryers, there are other options for home washing, and most laundromats will allow you to wash your cloth diapers there as long as they have been pre-rinsed. Our objective is to get as many bottoms in cloth as possible because it is better for baby and better for the world, but we also know it can be very cost effective.
We would love to talk with your further or be a resource for follow up stories. Please keep an eye out for us — April is Earth Day Month so you will find us sponsoring the Great Cloth Diaper Change (we are attempting to break a world record by changing the most cloth diapers at once. It’s a world wide effort.) on the 26th at AmberSky in Maplewood and out at Forest Park on the 27th for Earth Day.
Also, in response to this article, we are doing a donation period where we will be donating one gently used prefold each time we get a new like or comment on our Facebook page in response to this article up to 250 prefolds.
Thanks for listening – we love to talk cloth!
Kathy and Mark Huntebrinker
Owners of Simply Clean Diaper Service of St. Louis
