A new TV? A fancy stand mixer for the kitchen? What did I get excited about in the silly sales? Nappies! Yes, new nappies. This is the place my life is at the moment.
After a bit of experimenting with different all in one nappies and a couple of brands of wrap, this has become my most reliable go to option. Motherease wrap, Totsbots Bamboozle nappy. This is the combination that will contain the hurricane force crap and the Noah's flood of wee - except as I'm a Classicist, I'm going to amend that to Deucalion's flood. It's more entertaining, and the story about the establishment of the temple precinct at the site of the great drain where all the water went as recorded by Lucian has a story about a very sensible man cutting his penis off so he couldn't possibly be accused of interfering with the kings wife which in turn led to an annual festival of men getting drunk and getting their willy's lopped off. Now I don't know all the versions of the Noah's ark tale, but I don't think any have such silliness in them.
Oh, nappies. Totsbots aren't all that cheap. They work out as very cheap in the long run, but actually shelling out twelve or thirteen quid a go is enough to stop me from going overboard too frequently. 20% off though? Thank you nappylady I shall take that offer!
Can you tell which the old one is in this picture? That would be the rather grey and less fluffy one. My mostly comically knackered of the original Totsbots are in the wash at the moment. There's one that has a whole in the front and the velcro tabs are pretty much only held on by the microfibre webbing that holds all the bamboo fibres together. I thought about 6 months ago that another couple of washes and it would have to go in the bin. But it still seems to work perfectly fine, so until it actually falls to pieces it shall remain in rotation.
I bought the original stash of bamboozle nappies for Sally when she was about 6 months and grew out of the size ones. She then wore them until she was about 2. Pip has also worn them for about 18 months now. Each gets washed 2 or 3 times a week - let's say 10 times a month - a conservative estimate says they've had about 360 washes. I don't think I would expect any of my clothes to survive being washed that many times without becoming rags. So with a new baby on the way next year, I figured I could justify a few new bums... kinda wish I'd bought a green dino print as well as the duckies one though. (At an average of £12 each - some were bought as part of bundles and were thus cheaper - 360 times is about 3p a go at this point, yes I have to pay electricity for the washing machine, but even Aldi nappies are 7p each)
Whilst I'm pretty much wedded to Totsbots for the main nappies (I do have a bunch of Little Lamb microfibre ones too, as they dry in about a quarter of the time and having a few that don't take a day to dry are helpful) Motherease are now the only wraps I'll buy. I have been seduced a few times by the patterns Blueberry make, but unless they stop the wee from leaking out, wraps have no place in my drawer, and in my experience neither the Totsbots nor the Blueberry ones can do that. Thus it was very exciting when someone in that delightful Canadian company realised that it is now the 21st century and people like pretty patterns. Either that, or the company that makes their fabrics said enough with the hideous jungle print and refused to print any more of their awful patterns. Then - last year, NEW prints were released. Bears and mountains, cacti and pineapples and a variety of other prints could be found dancing across the bums of babies across the America's and even crossed the Atlantic to us - patterns that appeared to have been put together by an actual graphic designer - and now there are more new ones again. Bombproof and beautiful - how can pampers fight against that? (Oh yeah, massive advertising budget...)
So - thank you nappylady (best nappy website) and thank you Totsbots and Motherease for making very good bum products for the small people in my house and stopping me from making a pile like this...
Apparently the average baby gets through 4,000 disposable nappies by the time they’re potty-trained, which in 2014 when the Guardian article I'm citing was written cost about £400 a year and created the equivalent of half a tonne of carbon dioxide. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/jul/04/nappies-which-best-disposables-reusables-cost-ethics
And for those people who say 'you're so good, I could never do that, disposables are just so much easier' - yes, they are a little bit easier to put on, I tend to do up a few poppers as well as a couple of velcro tabs. And yes, they are a little bit more of a faff to deal with the dirty ones - I have to put the poo in the toilet and the nappy in a bucket and not a bin, then every couple of days I have to take the bucket to the kitchen and load it into the washing machine, add washing powder and press 'go' rather than take the bin out. Yes, I do also have to hang the nappies up to dry. But, I save lots of money, I don't tend to run out of nappies, I don't put loads of waste that will never rot into landfill and I don't put chemicals that smell hideous when wet next to my babies bottoms - and for that, I'm happy to put in just a little bit more effort. Especially when the patterns are cool.