Why should you use a diaper service? Because it makes life so much easier! If you are new to cloth diapering, it will be your very best start— no overwhelming amount of extra laundry and work, and nothing beats the beautiful look and fresh smell of those carefully folded bundles arriving at your doorstep every week! If you area veteran cloth diaperer, you may find times when having the work done for you is welcome relief within the complexities of a busy lifestyle, whether you work from home, at home, or outside the home.

• I feel like a queen every week when the guy takes all my dirty diapers away and leaves these nice plastic bags full of soft, sweet-smelling, lovely whiteness. All I do is tie the bag, put it out the door, write a check, and relax. During the week I merely shake any solid waste I can into the toilet, then throw the diaper in the bucket. Simple! If it's very hot and humid you may want to rinse the diaper first, but the services definitely say you don't need to do this. Then you wash your diaper covers with your next laundry load, or hand wash, depending on the kind of covers you have. Some diaper services even wash the covers for you.

• I love a diaper service especially right after the birth of the baby. You don't have to juggle an extra load or two a week to your already burgeoning laundry pile. You should do everything to make life easier on yourself, especially in _the often-overwhelming postpartum period!

• The costs are generally less than using disposables over the diapering period, even with the purchase of covers. Some services even rent diaper covers to you (for as little as 25 cents a week a piece) so you don't have to buy a whole bunch of covers all at once.
• You can pay for service by the week or by the month. The service in my area gives the 7th week free if I pay for six weeks up front!

• The Diagard process (the name some services use for their laundering process), with 13 wash and rinse cycles, plus monthly testing of random diaper samples, ensures perfectly germ-free, sanitized diapers. If you have any problems with rashes, your diaper service can even help you by adjusting the pH of your own batch of diapers (for no additional charge). This often helps babies having rashes due to teething or trying new foods.

• I feel so good and right about using a diaper service. Though home-washing your own diapers is certainly better for the environment than using disposables, it takes less water and energy to wash one diaper-service diaper than one of my own home-washed ones. Plus services re-use the final rinse water as the wash water for the next load. And some services are starting to use environmentally-safe hydrogen-peroxide bleaching instead of the much maligned chlorine for bleaching.

• Lovely, soft, sanitized, dean, durable sweet-smelling white diapers, every week, with no work.