Oh how I love my cloth nappies. I was trying to figure it out the other day...why do I love it so much? I think I just get such a kick out of saving money and I just love all the new nappies they have out there to make our lives easier! Anyway I've decided to write a little bit more about my cloth nappy experiences because I seem to learn more and more as Béibhinn gets older and she hasn't even reached a year yet!
Recently Béibhinn has taken off with eating solids. She LOVES her food! She eats three meals a day including a half cup of oatmeal/porridge for breakfast. While I'm very happy for her new found love of solids, I've found that solids poop is a whole other kind of poop! I was very spoiled with 6 months of pure breastmilk poop, then another couple of months of about 80% breastmilk poop. In the space of a couple of weeks we started getting full on stinky, lumpy, sticky, solids poop! Did I ever wish I could toilet train her!
At this point I was still using
Flat Fold Nappies and
Mother-ease Sandy's Fitted Diapers. Andrew installed a
diaper sprayer to our toilet. This means that every time Béibhinn has a dirty nappy (which is pretty much every time) we need to take the nappy to the toilet and spray the poop off it. Pros: her nappy bucket never smells too badly and the poop goes where it's supposed to (down the toilet, not in the dump), it makes me clean my toilet bowl more often because I find myself staring at it a couple of times a day. Cons: it's a little bit horrible (quote: Naomi O'Sullivan) and it's just extra work.
Because of this I decided I was done with Flat Fold Nappies. I figured I was doing enough work washing, drying, stripping and now spraying nappies, having to fold them before putting them on the child was just too much. I also knew that she was growing out of them and that in a few months she'd be growing out of the Sandy's fitted nappies. It was time to try out some of these new nappies I've been hearing about!
Recently I joined a group on facebook for cloth nappy users in Ireland. Yes, I know I don't live in Ireland anymore but can't a home sick girl just pretend? On this group I kept hearing about all kinds of different nappies. Pocket nappies and flips being the predominate ones. Also, on our recent trip to Ireland I found myself using disposables on the plane as we traveled to and from Cork. It made life much easier to use disposables but the cost and the waste annoyed me. One Sunday during a conversation with a friend of mine she mentioned the cloth nappies that use inserts (
flips,
gnappies,
gdiapers,
charlie bananas). These nappies are known as "hybrid" nappies and they're really cool because they're slim fit and you can use either a cloth or a disposable insert (no need to buy a bunch of disposable nappies -yay!)
So I found a very cool baby shop in Waterloo,(
http://www.extraordinarybabyshoppe.com/) and went to check out their hybrid nappies. I decided to buy some flip nappies. 5 nappy covers, 12 cloth inserts and a packet of 18 disposable inserts all brand new with added tax $160-not bad!
I started using my flips straight away and I love love love them. They're soft and comfy for Béibhinn, they've great absorption, and they're one size, so they work from newborn to potty! I highly recommend these nappies. Now I haven't used them on a constantly peeing newborn but I'm pretty confident that they would work really well and it's really easy to just double them up whenever I need to.
One other yucky side affect of Béibhinn's love for solids is a nasty nappy rash. Coming home from Ireland she was pooping every hour and we couldn't keep up with her! By the time we got home her little bum was red raw and getting worse. I went to the pharmacist and he recommended mixing some hydrocortizone cream with a stronger nappy cream. I used this for about 2 weeks and while sometimes the rash seemed to improve, every now and then it would flair up again to the point of bleeding! I couldn't seem to kick this rash and poor little Bei Bei was very distressed. Finally I decided to try what a lot of my crunchy mommy friends have been recommending forever: coconut oil. I was very skeptical, I thought if the hydrocortizone doesn't work why on earth would coconut oil work? I was desperate though and willing to try anything. I bought the coconut oil and started using it less than a week ago. Béibhinn's rash stopped getting worse and now it is slowly but surely clearing up. I couldn't believe it! All I can say is, if your baby has a bad rash you've got to give this a go, it's really fantastic!
