Challenging the disposable!
A few things have been flying through my mind this week.
Our hospital stay when Fizz was born was great. I couldn’t fault the staff and our treatment. But as I have said before they provide Pampers to each new mum and stock them up everyday.
Our nursery is lovely but it provides disposable nappies as part of the weekly cost.
I am wondering now how I go about finding out the reasons why or if anyone has helped a nursery or hospital to change to reusable or even just had some experience of how to start a dialogue about this?
Sorry it’s a short blog today but I’m putting a call out to all mums to support the cloth bum and to help me along the way!
In hospital we had to provide our own nappies anyway (Countess of Chester) and out nursery also use disposables. I send them in their reusable nappies though which they are quite happy to do. Only thing at our nursery is I am the only one with my two who are in cloth, so they wouldn’t change the way they operate!
Em x
We’ve been thinking about this recently too. I might start a campaign to get washable nappies into hospitals, it really annoys me that they stick pampers on newborn babies. Even parents who decide to use cloth seem to let their baby wear a pampers in hospital, or for the first couple of weeks.
Get your newborns in cloth I say!
Im with you. If the hospital (Glan Clwyd)promoted or the midwives least gave you advice about reusables, I might have actually used the birth to potty pack I bought instead of using disposables as it is the box is still sat gathering dust 2.5 years later!
Educate, educate, educate! Not even the mw’s seem to know what they are, is that a nappy cover? Errr no, it’s a nappy!
I know several people who are put off using cloth becuase when their child goes to nursery they won’t use them, or won’t necessarily use the type they want to use, so end up using sposies from day one. I think if more nurseries were open to using cloth a lot more people would convert…
As for hospitals my hospital made me provide nappies so although with my first I used sposies, it means this time I wil be using cloth from day one.
Vicky x
Cloth from Day One!
Thanks Vicky my campaign now has a name!
Channa, that’s terrible, there is definitely a problem with educating people. I think we need to target midwifes really, they need to know that cloth is a “normal” option. They need to at least ask the question, are you using sposies or have you brought cloth nappies with you? In hospital I mean.
Our hospital has you provide nappies, and you can use cloth but someone has to take the dirty/wet ones home at the end of each day for washing. I plan to use them from the start with my next one, but also hope to avoid a hospital stay at all!! 🙂
Our nursery is happy for us to use cloth, they actually comment a lot on how they prefer to change my son as his nappies are easier to put on and they smell less and the tabs can’t rip!
lol Peter! Glad I can be of some use!
I agree re the midwives – and doctors needing educating – I loved taking my son to be weighed and seeing their faces when I strip them down to their cloth bums. At my son’s six week check the doctor spent more time talking to me about the benefits of cloth than the health of my son. It was considered unusual that I was using cloth rather than the other way round. I get looked at strangely when I say that I breastfeed, baby carry, and use cloth. Wasn’t that what our mums did as standard when we were little before the supposed “luxury” of sposies and formula??
Bit of a shocker, but my hospital actually encourage the use of cloth and have signs saying ‘bring the wraps and we’ll provide the fluff’. So I went out and bought some motherease to take into the hospotal with me.
Our hospital asked us everyone to provide their own nappies and after my son was born he wasn’t in a nappy for quite a while, just snuggled up naked against me, till a MW suggested at some point I might like to put one on him. I’d just given birth – I wouldn’t have minded a bit of poo on me after all that!! But they didn’t take him away and do it for me… They did, however have to give us a pampers because the eco sposies we had brought with us were way too big for the poor little chap! I was told countless horror stories about newborn poo, so I didn’t even consider cloth from birth. I’ll know for next time though…
Claire that’s amazing! Which hospital is this, I’d love to know how or who organised it.
The nursery that my daughter is about to start at provides disposables as part of the cost. They’ve agreed to do cloth for us- it would be nice if there were a reduction in cost though! Once we’ve been going there for a while I might raise the cloth issue, see if they’ll think about it. They do like to consider the environmental cost of things, so maybe they’ll be interested. Not sure how the other parents would feel though? And what happens at the end of that day- do they have to put them all back into disposables before they go home?
And we did use the disposables that the hospital provided at the start, but the very first thing we did when we got home was put a cloth nappy on her. I found the disposables very papery and they were already irritating her around the tops of her legs. On the plus side doing it that way meant that the meconium poop all went in the disposable. I know for next time though that I can start on the cloth straight away!
Helen
We used cloth in hospital – fleece liner took care of the meconium no problem!
The nursery i want to put Ivy to has said to provide disposables but i plan to argue my case for using cloth – if they won’t then i’ll have to go to a child minder instead as i really don;t want to use disposables : (
our nursey are happy to uses our cloth nappies but not keen to change over – they could not cope with the washing – not interested in laundry service and many parents don’t want their children in nappies worn by others is their response
When I asked nursery about using cloth with Alfie there, they couldn’t permit it for “hygiene” reasons. I did use cloth in hospital when Alfie had over night stays due to illness and the staff were intrigued. We only ever stayed a few nights and hubby always came for dirty nappies.