'Real nappy' week

A few weeks ago it was ‘real nappy week’ meaning that all over my Facebook and Instagram cloth nappy companies are having small, 10, 20 or 25% off sales. Like all these kinds of days or weeks, it’s realy just a bit of a marketing ploy, although who benefitted form a sale on yesterday’s ‘Penguins Day’ is anyone’s guess!

Anyway, cloth nappies...this is a tricky one. I love cloth nappies. They are cute and hugely benificial to the environment. Having a baby has given me land-fill guilt I’m a way I never thaught possible, and David Attenborough didn’t help with that! (Who even knew it land-fill guilt was a thing?!) There are lots of arguments for and against cloth nappies, but here is my take on them.

In the early days, with baby no1, I used them all the time. I tried really hard to get them right, sokeing them in a bucket and making sure I never ran out. But I was forever getting leaks and making more washing for myself, and fairly soon I gave up on them. A little while later I discovered a different type, switching from two-part Bambino Mio to their one part Mio Solo and found this *much* easier. That said, I STILL got a few leaks and found them really big and bulky, and I really couldn’t get them right overnight at all. I resorted to using them in the daytime at home and using disposables at night and when we went out.

Like anything baby-related, I found that somewhere in between was the way for me. Not quite dilll cloth-bum Mum but not just disposables either, and every time I use a cloth I tell myself it’s one less for the landfill, one less to take 1000 years to disappear. I do wish I was better at it, but I am used to sitting in the middle ground now with most things baby.

Pros of cloth nappies:

+ they are really cute, all the patterns and designs are sweet and look lovely on baby.

+ they are better for the environment,

+ they are cheaper, although they cost more to buy and you still have to wash them, overall they are cheaper

+nappy rash is way better in them then in disposables

cons of cloth nappies:

+ you have to wash then

+ you have to carry them about smelling of poo when you’re out

+ they are really fat on baby’s bottom and you have to go up a size in clothes/vests because tight clothes cause leaks.

+ they are a bit tricky to get right in terms of never getting leaks etc...

+ poo in your washing machine

+some people would argue that they end up in the land full too so it’s something of a faulse economy, however, the counter-argument is so clear here, far less go in the land-fill, and most cloth-bum users recycle and sell on or donate once used anyway.

Some people find it really repulsive to wash nappies (or cloth baby wipes which are also amazing in case you hadn’t heard of them!) but what happens when your toddler is potty training and they have an accident? Do you immediately throw away the clothes they were in, or do you stick them in the washer and hope you can save them? And how different is washing cloth to that? In my experience, most parents find that when becoming parents a lot of their inhabitions and concerns around ‘poo’ disappear anyway. From the very start with The Girl, poo, changed how I delivered her from what I wanted to being completely out of my hands, and after a few weeks of nappy changing those early black pops or runny milk pops, you become fairly immune to poo one way or another. Plus, disposables leak too, and nothing is a perfect solution.

I now use one-piece nappies with a booster in and a washable liner. I rearly get leakes anymore, but I don’t use them every time. Just when I can. It all not an ideal solution but it works for us.