Day 22 - Back in cloth

(Tuesday August 10th)

It was such a relief today to reach for the bag of cloth nappies rather than a disposable. Out of necessity, we'd used disposables all throughout our holiday - we knew it was going to be a busy week without much time for laundry, and as my parents had an extra 3 adults and a toddler staying with them the demands on their washing machine would be much higher than normal without the added burden of my fluff.

I have to say that it is easier, and quicker, changing a disposable nappy. Plus there's pretty much no worrying about leaks, and it's much lighter to carry around 5 disposable nappies than 5 cloth. All that aside, I missed the cloth nappies so much! Convenience, speed and lightness of travelling aren't really important to me, and I felt guilty every time we reached for a disposable. I can't believe we took so long to switch to cloth, I'm such a convert now.

Plus, however many disposables you take with you, you can still run out. When we went to the beach, we took 5 disposables and 2 swim nappies. As I was carrying him in the Mei Tai, we elected not to use the swim nappies when we went paddling, as swim nappies just contain solid matter, and the rest just runs right out. I didn't fancy having that running down my back. So by the end of the day we'd worked our way through 4 of the nappies. I lay him down and changed him into the last clean nappy ready for the 2 hour journey home. Once finished, I picked him up and stood him by the car. He took hold of the side of the car, stood on tiptoes, and made his poo face. Oh dear.

A frantic search through the car ensued. Could we put him in a swim nappy and put one of the used disposables on top? Or lay a muslin inside one of the used nappies? Walk all the way back down to Spar and buy a whole pack of Pampers, while he stood around in a filthy nappy?

I eyed the stack of muslins sadly and thought that if we were using cloth, it wouldn't have been a problem. I could have just whipped off the dirty nappy, folded the muslins into a nappy shape and covered them with the wrap.

Thankfully, my ever-trusty swim bag came up trumps again (remember we found a tiny newborn hat to stave off the wind?), and we found a too-small but clean disposable languishing in the bottom of it.

From now on, even if we're on holiday using disposables, I'm going to be lugging a cloth nappy and a wrap around with me, just in case.