Cloth nappies: will your baby be wearing them?
Congratulations, you’re pregnant! Now prepare yourself for the long list of decisions
you need to make in the coming months. Will you find out the sex of your baby before it is born? Where will you give birth to your baby? What names do you like for your baby? The questions start as soon as you announce the good news and will probably last for the duration of your pregnancy.
I remember my mum asking me, “so are you going to use cloth nappies?” My response to this was probably something like, “are you mad mother?” Luckily, I did decide to investigate this idea before I made a decision. After all, people managed with cloth years ago, how hard can it be?
I decided to ask around and get some opinions from friends who were currently using cloth nappies and I was actually quite surprised by the positive feedback I got. What I didn’t realise was that these days you don’t need to fold your nappies and stick a great big pin in them. Modern day nappies are shaped to fit your baby and close with either poppers, velcro, or a handy little gripper called the Nappi Nippa.
Well, this is all great, but what actually makes people choose to use cloth nappies instead of disposables? One of the biggest reasons I found for people using cloth nappies was that they wanted to save some money. By using cloth nappies you can in fact save up to £500 per child.
Another big reason for choosing cloth is for environmental reasons. I did use disposables for about the first 2 weeks with my daughter. I was astounded by the amount of rubbish someone so small can make! Of course its’s not just the disposable nappy that you have to throw away, it’s the nappy sack that it goes into, and then the bin liner that the nappy sack goes into. When you think that disposables take hundreds of years to rot down, that’s a huge amount of nappies being dumped every year.
One thing I didn’t realise before I started researching nappies is
that disposables actually contain chemicals! Call me naive but it just never occurred to me. You know you sometimes get little blobs of translucent gel on a babies bum after wearing a disposable? Well that’s the chemicals that are used to absorb the wee. I personally did not want that next to my baby’s skin.
So my daughter now has a lovely selection of cotton nappies which look cute and cuddly, are easy to wash and give me a nice warm feeling when I see them blowing on the line. I’m so glad I didn’t just accuse my mother of being mad when she suggested them to me… this was one decision I found quite easy to make.