Sunday, August 8, 2010

First successful cloth nappy adventure

After the size 1 nappy disaster I was forced to buy Huggies as I said. I ordered the seventh generation, but they wont arrive until Tuesday. As luck may have it, Alison had some newborn nappy covers, so we gave pre-fold cloth nappies a try. Its gone well, thankfully! I have the Snappi fastners which makes securing the nappy a whiz and I dont worry about hurting the baby. They are bulky and the covers stick out under his onsies, so I wouldn't use them to take him out in public, they also rustle every time he moves. I wouldn't use them at night because he 'creates' (I love that phrase!) pretty much as soon as he pees in the pre-folds, where as in the disposables he can wait 'til he wakes up for his next feed. I threw them into a bucket of baking soda water (1 cup baking soda, two gallons water) and washed them on a hot wash with an extra rinse cycle. They are now stain free and drying in the sun. What a snap. Because I only have 12 pre-folds we are back on disposables until these dry. I never intended to use pre-folds but was given them as a shower gift... I have to say they have turned out to be a pleasant surprise. I actually recommend them, for breastfed babies at least; I have no experience of formula fed.

Pre-fold pros:
Much more pleasant for a pooy nappy. In a disposable nappy the liquid gold just pools up, sticks to his bum and sometimes oozes out the sides. ick. It is soaked up by the pre-fold cloth so no oozing or sticking to baby.

Not throwing a ton of stuff away. Major plus in my book!


Pre-fold cons:
He usually kicks up a fuss to get changed asap after peeing, so I felt like I was changing him more frequently than in the disposables.

With a little chicken-leg man like Henry, the cover doesn't fit snuggly, so he managed to leak pee out of one leg opening onto my mum (who took it remarkably well!). But he only leaked one out of 12 times.

You have to wash them; though since you always have a ton of baby laundry anyway, this is a minor con, in my opinion.

1 comment:

  1. I haven't heard this comparison. Seems I only know parents doing one or the other for newborns. We have a giant stack of prefolds so this is our plan when the boy decides to show himself. We have 4 prefolds alone packed for the trip to the Birth Center. We were also told to get a scraper (little plastic one like you use for dishes) to help scrape any poo from the prefold. The ones we use look stain free and they never bothered with the extreme wash you did. They just dumped it in a dry bucket and washed as normal with some Biokleen. You end up washing them enough that the stains are never an issue.

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