Review: Baby City Diapers

The first diapers I bought were Baby City Diapers, so they will be my first diaper review.

Since this is my first review, I'm going to rate my diapers 
based on the following categories: cost, quality, daytime use, overnight use, convenience, and overall score.  I'm going to use a scale of 1-5 to rate them, where 1 is horrible, 2 is not great, 3 is pretty good, 4 is good and 5 is awesome.  (Simple, huh?)  This rubric may be subject to change in the future, depending on what I'm reviewing.  The categories will definitely change if I'm reviewing something that's not a diaper or insert.

Description:
Baby City diapers are a made in China brand of diapers, usually found for a low price on eBay.  There are a bunch of these brands on eBay.  I just looked to find a stock picture and all of the pictures below are branded as Baby City diapers.  I liked the bright colors, so I ordered all of the gender neutral ones, since I didn't know if I was having a boy or a girl.  

They are a pocket diaper with one row of snaps that cross over, one opening at the back of the diaper, no hip snaps and come with one microfiber insert.  They are a one-size diaper with three size settings that are supposed to fit a child from 8-35 lbs.  You snap the top three snaps to the bottom ones for size small, the top three to the middle three for medium and leave it unsnapped for large.

Cost: 5 (Awesome!)
I was looking through different cloth diapers on eBay when I first decided to cloth diaper my baby.  I was still pregnant at the time and hadn't done much research into CDing.  I saw that they had 10 diapers for $25, including inserts.  I thought that $2.50 a diaper was a great deal and that even if I hated them, I wouldn't be out much money.  If you're low on funds, $2.50 each might seem like a  great deal!

Quality: 1 (Horrible!)
Yes, $2.50 per diaper is a great deal, unless the quality of the diaper is so bad that you can barely get your $2.50 worth!  I realized not long after I ordered the diapers that it might have been a mistake from the reviews of various made in China diapers that I read after I bought them.  You can feel the cheapness of the diaper as soon as you touch it.  The outer PUL of the diaper is very thin, as is the microfleece layer inside.  You can stretch the tabs, which actually came in handy when crossing the tabs over, but that's not really supposed to happen.  (I found this out when I got another brand of snap diapers that was a much better quality.)  

Also, the microfiber inserts only seemed to have 2-3 layers to them.  They were thin and I was afraid to use them because they didn't look like they could hold anything.  Plus, they started pilling in the very first wash load.

In addition to the inserts being really crappy, the leg gussets are pathetic.  There was elastic only part of the way around the leg opening, leaving plenty of room for leaks, which I got in spades.

The biggest reason why I give the Baby City diapers a 1 in quality is because they all delaminated after the second wash!  I washed them the first time in hot water to prep them for my son to wear.  After he wore them once, I washed them again in hot water.  When I took them out of the washer, I noticed that they sounded sort of squeaky when they moved and so I opened the pocket and the plastic laminate was coming off of the diaper!  This happened to every single one!  Just about every one has gone in the trash. 

(Note: If your diaper delaminates, it's finished.  There's no way to fix that.  You can keep using it until the plastic tears inside, but you can count on a leak if it does.  The best use for a delaminated diaper is to use it as a swim diaper.  I saved one to use for swimming next summer and to take pictures of for this post.)

Fit: 1 (Horrible!)
They didn't fit my 6 lb 12 oz baby when he was born, so I had to use another brand and tried them on from time to time until they fit him.  They finally sort of fit when he was about a month old because he has really chunky thighs.  I was able to put them on him on the smallest rise setting, crossing over the tabs, when he was about 10 lbs.
At a month old, my son wasn't very mobile, so I didn't think that the lack of hip snaps was going to be an issue.  Actually, it didn't occur to me that I would need them at all because of a lack of basis for comparison.  All of my other diapers were aplix.  Well, the Baby City diapers taught me the value of hip snaps!  I got the worst wing droop and gapping around the thighs imaginable with these diapers.  I don't even know how it managed to droop on a baby who barely moved!  He's not crawling yet and definitely not walking, so I am truly stumped. 

Daytime Use: 2 (Not great)
I only ever tried these during the day, so I'm going to leave out overnight use for now.  Needless to say, I got leaks galore the few times that I used these diapers due to the wing droop.  I saved them for laundry day or if I wanted to put something looser around my son's thighs to give them a rest from the tighter diapers that I used on him the rest of the time, so I did get a tiny bit of use out of them.  You can see in the picture how big the gap around his thigh is, even though his thighs are really chunky at 3 months old and it's on the lowest rise setting.

Convenience: 2 (Not great)

It's not very convenient to have to change your baby's clothes every time he pees, but these diapers did open me up to how convenient it is to have pocket diapers prestuffed and just snap them on the baby.  It intrigued me enough to start researching all over again, pouring gasoline on my cloth diaper addiction fire.

Overall: 2.2 (Not great)
These diapers are an example of you get what you pay for.  Like I said before, I barely got my $2.50's worth out of them.  If I had thought about the swim diaper thing, I would have kept a few more of them and then I would have actually got my money's worth.  But hey, next summer is soon enough to get some actual swim diapers or use a few of my cuter covers as swim diapers.

Okay, this was my first experience with cloth, so learn from it.  Don't do what I did and just buy blindly.  If you're reading this, the first thing that you should take from it is to research the hell out of your diapers before you buy them!  Ask other CDing moms that you know, if you know any.  Read every review that google has to offer.  Watch videos on YouTube about how they work.  Look to see if the quality of the item matches the price because your diapers are an investment.  Good diapers can be sold for almost what you paid for them or used for the next child.  Thankfully, I'm only out $25.  I could have been out way more than that!