The Motherload Blog

Cloth Diapering 101

Just wanted to let everyone know that I have written a new article on cloth diapering. If you have ever entertained the idea of cloth diapering or are just wondering what it is all about, please visit our Cloth Diapering 101 article. To someone who has already taken the cloth diapering challenge, it will be old news to you, but to someone just starting out…I am hoping it is a goldmine of information.

Feel free to sound off in our comments section on cloth diapering. What is your favorite kind of cloth diaper? Where have you gotten the best deals? (No advertisements please- just personal experiences!)

If you are a cloth diapering distributor and would like to be listed in our Cloth Diapering Resources links, please send a $15 PayPal payment to advertise@momadvice.com with a name & link to your company. We would be happy to include you as a resource for the moms who visit our site!

WFMW: Foamy Soap

It is Works-For-Me Wednesday and I am happy to participate in this weekly event. For more great tips for you & your family visit the WFMW Founder, Shannon, at her website Rocks in My Dryer. There are a whole slew of great ideas for your family.

My little tip this week is regarding those foamy hand soaps that you can buy. I got three of these from a family member for Christmas one year and I love them. There is something about a foamy hand soap that makes me feel like my hands are so much cleaner. Ironically, the foaming hand soaps are only about ¼ soap and the rest is just good old-fashioned water.

When I ran out of soap, I decided to save the container and reuse it. I filled this container with our daughter’s bath wash (1/4 full) and then filled it the rest of the way with water. Gave it a good shimmy shake and ta-da! This makes your very own foamy bath soap for your little one. I just squirt a dollop of soap directly on her and rub it in with a washcloth. When you have a wet and wild little wiggle worm like I do, this soap makes things a lot easier for us during bath time.

I just peeled the label off of the front of the Bath & Body soap and labeled it (with my trusty label maker) and popped it in with her bath soaps & toys. It is amazing how much further our soap goes when we use this versus the regular old pump soap.

Want more WFMW solutions? Here ya go!

Adventures in Shipping

Frugal Exercise Solutions

Microfiber Obsessions

Sand Between Your Toes Blues

Giving the Gift of Magazines (Frugally)

Solution for Cheap Trash Bags

Programming Your Cell Phone

Free Up Pantry Space: Make a Snack

Weeding Through Your Child’s Art Work Creatively

Using the Coffee Maker With Ease

Making Your Spice Rack Usable

Maximizing Space

Store Brand Diaper Reviews

Have you ever wondered if the Target diapers are actually as good of quality as the Pampers or Huggies? One of my favorite bloggers over at Baby Cheapskate, actually answers this question and reviews each of the off-brand diapers in her two part series on her Diaper Odyssey.

Store Brand Savings & Quality: A Diaper Odyssey Part 1
Store Brand Savings & Quality: A Diaper Odyssey Part 2

If you have ever considered buying an off-brand diaper, be sure to visit this site to get the scoop on who has the best bang for your buck.

We are cloth diapering our daughter, but we did do disposable with our son. I found the Smiles brand of diapers (carried by Sam’s) to be our personal favorites. This was both for cost and for quality!

Included in the reviews are Target, Walmart, Costco, CVS, Walgreens, Kroger, and Publix.

Are you looking for free diapers? If you write a store brand diaper review for Baby Cheapskate, they will pick up the tab. You can read more information on this opportunity here.

This is a MotherLoad must read!

Cheap Baby-Making

Yes, I realize that some people can make babies for FREE (lucky folks!), but there are those of us out there that have a harder time getting pregnant.

With my son, we had absolutely no problems getting pregnant. He came exactly when we wanted and there was no stress associated with getting pregnant. Getting pregnant with baby #2 was much harder than I could have ever anticipated. We tried for two years to get pregnant and God had a much different timeline then we could have ever imagined. During that time I tried everything (other than any invasive fertility treatments) under the sun to get pregnant. I was desperate to get pregnant and was open to just about anything to achieve it.

I wanted to share with you ladies, a couple of resources that I found to be invaluable during this time, and how we finally ended up getting pregnant with our daughter.

Fertility Friend is a GREAT website and was just what I needed to figure out exactly when was the optimal time to try. A girlfriend had suggested it to me and since then I have been telling anyone & everyone about this site. It is a free service (you can, of course, pay for extra membership goodies) where you can chart everything into one place. The chart then will highlight the days that you should try, based on the information you have put in it, and it helps you to actually try when the trying is good…so to speak! Thanks to my girlfriend, Xtina, for sharing this information with me!

If you are a habitual tester, you will find this website to be of great value. Save On Tests is a great discount spot to get your ovulation & pregnancy tests. Purchasing these tests (even the Walmart off-brand) was becoming w-a-y too expensive. I decided to look into finding another resource for these tests. Save On Tests just sells the strips and they offer great inexpensive package deals that can really help save you a lot of money. For example, 25 ovulation test strips is only $10.25! That is such a bargain! They also offer ovulation & pregnancy tests in one package deal. These are so much more affordable than anywhere else and you will feel a little less guilty testing so often if you aren’t paying an arm & a leg for your tests. Just a note, the packages that are the cheapest are JUST the strips. You are not paying for the little plastic thingiemabobs that they come in. It does not make it any less effective, just a little messier. They do offer the plastic test cassettes, but you do have to pay a little more to get those.

Finally, investing in a copy of, “Taking Charge of Your Fertility,” will help you greatly in trying to achieve pregnancy. This book is, what I have termed as, the fertility bible. It has information in it about how your body works and understanding the signs and timing of ovulation in women. I highly recommend this book to any woman (not just those who are trying) because it can help you in NOT getting pregnant too.

A lot can be said for simply sitting back and waiting for God’s timing. Was God’s timing good for us, after waiting this long for a baby? Yes! Would our timing have been quite as good? Probably not! Even though, God had wonderful timing, it did help me to feel more proactive, in our situation, having these tools at my disposal as we were trying to get pregnant.

Yes, I know what you are thinking! The answer is yes. I really am that frugal!