It seems my 26 month old daughter cannot bring herself to part with her nappies. Perhaps it is the inevitable fact she will be giving up her career in nappy modelling.
I have tried for months to get her to even contemplate sitting on her potty. Clothed or unclothed we have had no success.
One time I left her pants-less, trying my best to catch her in the act. Sure as eggs, the minute I left the room she went. On my return I found a big pile of number 2's and my dear daughter sitting next to it hugging the potty, which she had picked up and placed in her lap.
Was she confused? Was she sending me a message to tell me to just forget it? Does she have an incredible sense of humour and knew how hilarious this scene would appear?
No matter what was going on, I was not getting her to sit on that potty.
So now we have a new baby and I'm feeling a greater need then ever to toilet train dear daughter. Her nappies smell awful, are messy, and I think she is surely big enough to graduate to underpants. I've bought undies with all her favourite characters on them to no avail.
Last week I decided to find her kryptonite. The one thing I knew would bring her down in her plight to refuse the potty. Chocolate.
"Charlotte, if you sit on the potty for mummy, you can have some chocolate." Instant success! She couldn't sit on the potty quick enough. Hurrah!
Unfortunately, we managed to get nothing in the potty but we were on our way, finally sitting on it with no pants on.
Charlotte managed to con me out of 3 pieces of chocolate (across about 10 promises of pooping on the potty). I felt conned. She was better at this then I was giving her credit for. She even got all anxious like she was about to go, would sit down, ask for the chocolate, then get up and walk away.
The next morning she starting getting anxious. "Potty mummy." Hurrah! My little plan had worked. The kid was a genius and after a night sleeping on it she wanted to use the potty. I whipped off the nappy, she sat down, looked up at me and said "Chocolate?".
Ever since, whenever we talk about the potty all she has to say is "chocolate?". Here's hoping we make progress soon.
Wednesday 30 January 2013
Monday 14 January 2013
Do routines really work?
When having my first baby I read every book I could get my hands on about routines. It all sounded so easy. My baby was going to sleep for 16 hours a day. She would have set wake up and sleep times.
How was I going to kill all those hours at home? Having just finished up in a full time job managing a team of 15 people, I wondered what would I spend my days doing. I'd have hours to mop the floors, wash the clothes, and enjoy my little bundle of joy. What were all these parents complaining about? All babies did was sleep and play.
Boy was I naïve.
Sadly, neither of our newborns had read the same books I had. They did not seem to know they should sleep till 7am and want to feed as per the book. They also disagreed about going to sleep. I could (and still am with our 9 week old) spend an hour just to calm them to sleep only to hear them screaming ten minutes later.
What am I doing wrong?
It seems sadly that babies are never like in the Johnson & Johnson commercial. My babies have never looked that happy, and I have never had time to look like that mother with my make up and hair done rolling around blissfully on the floor with our baby. If they aren't screaming then I am taking two minutes to run to the loo or prepare the next meal.
Do these angels exist? Or is it a marketing ploy by companies to trick us into having babies so they can sell us more stuff? Of course I would have had babies regardless. The joy outweighs the moments of sheer hell. But I think we need to be honest. No one had ever let onto me how hard being a mother can be. I knew everyone said it was hard work, but there was no indication of what that meant. Mothers tend not to talk about how hard they find it for fear of being judged or seeming like they are not a good parent.
But back to my initial thoughts. Do routines ever work? Are they a miracle cure like they are advertised to be?
We have recently decided to put our 9 week old on a routine. So far it is not working. She does not sleep the required length of time and by the time she is finally deep asleep it's time to wake her for the next schedule feed.
So, do we perservere? Do we give up? Will this eventually suddenly solve all our problems. The book has promised me it will.
What are your experiences? Do you use a routine? Does it work? As for me, stay tuned… I will let you know.
How was I going to kill all those hours at home? Having just finished up in a full time job managing a team of 15 people, I wondered what would I spend my days doing. I'd have hours to mop the floors, wash the clothes, and enjoy my little bundle of joy. What were all these parents complaining about? All babies did was sleep and play.
Boy was I naïve.
Sadly, neither of our newborns had read the same books I had. They did not seem to know they should sleep till 7am and want to feed as per the book. They also disagreed about going to sleep. I could (and still am with our 9 week old) spend an hour just to calm them to sleep only to hear them screaming ten minutes later.
What am I doing wrong?
 |
| A rare moment: Em sitting happily |
Do these angels exist? Or is it a marketing ploy by companies to trick us into having babies so they can sell us more stuff? Of course I would have had babies regardless. The joy outweighs the moments of sheer hell. But I think we need to be honest. No one had ever let onto me how hard being a mother can be. I knew everyone said it was hard work, but there was no indication of what that meant. Mothers tend not to talk about how hard they find it for fear of being judged or seeming like they are not a good parent.
But back to my initial thoughts. Do routines ever work? Are they a miracle cure like they are advertised to be?
We have recently decided to put our 9 week old on a routine. So far it is not working. She does not sleep the required length of time and by the time she is finally deep asleep it's time to wake her for the next schedule feed.
So, do we perservere? Do we give up? Will this eventually suddenly solve all our problems. The book has promised me it will.
What are your experiences? Do you use a routine? Does it work? As for me, stay tuned… I will let you know.
Saturday 12 January 2013
I have a confession...
I hate doing the washing. But don't we all!
Washing nappies was my biggest turn off when I first considered using cloth nappies. What I hate most about washing is standing at the clothes line in the blistering hot summer sun. It's fiddly and annoying. I'd rather be sitting inside: cool and not sunburnt.
But washing nappies is the easiest of my washing cycles.
All the nappies go in a bucket. Rather then walking the nappies to the bin, I drop them in our pail. At washing time there is no sorting. No gathering up the coloureds or whites – it all goes in together. There is no scrubbing out stains, buckets of soaking or putting the clothes inside out to avoid fading.
I pick up the bucket and empty it into the washing machine (10 seconds!). Done.
I found the easiest, quickest and best way to hang my nappies is on a clothes horse. Why? Well it's easy. It can be done while watching TV, chatting to your family/kids, inside out of the sun and/or in between settling a cantankerous baby.
Lay out the nappies when you get the chance and pop them outside. You can even do this the night before and leave the nappies inside awaiting the morning sun to rise.
What's even better is when your nappies don't dry, you don't need to go take them off the line only to re-hang them later. You can shift the clothes horse around the yard to chase the sun, pop them in front of a heater, or in a draughty place inside. Or when it rains, bring them in quickly before they get wet awaiting you to pull them off the line in that typical frazzle when the rain starts to pour on your almost dry washing.
The clothes horse is my best friend in washing. It makes my life much easier, and for me, makes using cloth nappies a very simple part of our lives. Considering the washing is the biggest excuse people give for not using cloth, I must say it is incredibly easier then most think. It's only a few extra minutes out of your day that can fit in around your other chores with the only time needed to be spent outside is walking your clothes horse in and out the door (or just leave it in the living room if you don't mind them taking a bit longer!).
In reality, washing your nappies blends in to your life. Like washing any other clothes it just becomes part of the overall household chores/washing. After a week you don't even think about it. What you will notice is the saving on your weekly grocery bill, the cute soft nappy on your baby, and the lack of waste going into your bin each week.
Read our nappy care instructions on our website, and we'd love to hear from you about what tips you've discovered for washing your nappies.
Washing nappies was my biggest turn off when I first considered using cloth nappies. What I hate most about washing is standing at the clothes line in the blistering hot summer sun. It's fiddly and annoying. I'd rather be sitting inside: cool and not sunburnt.
But washing nappies is the easiest of my washing cycles.
All the nappies go in a bucket. Rather then walking the nappies to the bin, I drop them in our pail. At washing time there is no sorting. No gathering up the coloureds or whites – it all goes in together. There is no scrubbing out stains, buckets of soaking or putting the clothes inside out to avoid fading.
I pick up the bucket and empty it into the washing machine (10 seconds!). Done.
I found the easiest, quickest and best way to hang my nappies is on a clothes horse. Why? Well it's easy. It can be done while watching TV, chatting to your family/kids, inside out of the sun and/or in between settling a cantankerous baby.
Lay out the nappies when you get the chance and pop them outside. You can even do this the night before and leave the nappies inside awaiting the morning sun to rise.
What's even better is when your nappies don't dry, you don't need to go take them off the line only to re-hang them later. You can shift the clothes horse around the yard to chase the sun, pop them in front of a heater, or in a draughty place inside. Or when it rains, bring them in quickly before they get wet awaiting you to pull them off the line in that typical frazzle when the rain starts to pour on your almost dry washing.
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| Our Baby Bare stash out catching some rays. |
In reality, washing your nappies blends in to your life. Like washing any other clothes it just becomes part of the overall household chores/washing. After a week you don't even think about it. What you will notice is the saving on your weekly grocery bill, the cute soft nappy on your baby, and the lack of waste going into your bin each week.
Read our nappy care instructions on our website, and we'd love to hear from you about what tips you've discovered for washing your nappies.
Tuesday 8 January 2013
Nappies as clothes
Whilst Sydney experiences a heat wave I am trying to keep my two girls as cool as possible. Besides being naked, the best I can do is a nappy and nothing else.
This led me to the conclusion: cloth nappies make great clothes. It's a whole outfit in one little piece. Not only is the nappy ensuring I'm not running around with a mop and bucket, it's keeping my kids looking great.
Cloth nappies don't swell like disposables do after being worn for a while. They stay looking the same on the outside no matter what is going on inside. They fit well and don't bunch up like a disposable. This means they don't need anything over the top to have your child looking smart.
Last February I attended my Aunt's birthday party on the Northern Beaches. I had picked out the most gorgeous party dress for Charlotte. But it was truly boiling hot. Too hot for even a dress. We had put Charlotte in the car in just a nappy and when we got there we couldn't bring ourselves to put the dress on. I pulled out a plain white top and voila! Charlotte looked absolutely gorgeous in her bright red nappy and top. I had people stopping me at the party to say how fabulous she looked. Little did most of them know that all she was wearing was a nappy.
Similarly when yesterday we had a big family lunch, both girls wore rainbow striped tops and changed their outfit throughout the day with each nappy change. They looked very cute, stayed cool and only had to wear their nappy.
Plain coloured nappies are fabulous for this purpose. You can surely find a nappy to go with any top or under any dress. Nappies don't need bloomers over the top. They look wonderful under a dress and there is no need to hide them away. You also don't need to go through the annoyance of taking off bloomers to change a nappy and then put them back on again.
Similarly for boys, a cloth nappy under a pair of pants will blend in with their outfit. No white paper hanging out over the top of the pants like with a disposable.
Many parents worry they will need bigger clothes for their child if they are wearing cloth nappies. I have never found this to be a problem with Baby Bare nappies, which are trim and fit well under pants or jumpsuits.
Cloth nappies have many more pros then just saving money. Any parent who loves having their baby look great can see the benefit of having a nappy double as an outfit (or part thereof). Check out our beautiful range of Baby Bare colours here. You will find one to go with every outfit!
This led me to the conclusion: cloth nappies make great clothes. It's a whole outfit in one little piece. Not only is the nappy ensuring I'm not running around with a mop and bucket, it's keeping my kids looking great.
Cloth nappies don't swell like disposables do after being worn for a while. They stay looking the same on the outside no matter what is going on inside. They fit well and don't bunch up like a disposable. This means they don't need anything over the top to have your child looking smart.
Last February I attended my Aunt's birthday party on the Northern Beaches. I had picked out the most gorgeous party dress for Charlotte. But it was truly boiling hot. Too hot for even a dress. We had put Charlotte in the car in just a nappy and when we got there we couldn't bring ourselves to put the dress on. I pulled out a plain white top and voila! Charlotte looked absolutely gorgeous in her bright red nappy and top. I had people stopping me at the party to say how fabulous she looked. Little did most of them know that all she was wearing was a nappy.
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| Charlotte at 14 months in her Baby Bare Cub Nappy |
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| Em at 7.5 weeks. |
Similarly for boys, a cloth nappy under a pair of pants will blend in with their outfit. No white paper hanging out over the top of the pants like with a disposable.
Many parents worry they will need bigger clothes for their child if they are wearing cloth nappies. I have never found this to be a problem with Baby Bare nappies, which are trim and fit well under pants or jumpsuits.
Cloth nappies have many more pros then just saving money. Any parent who loves having their baby look great can see the benefit of having a nappy double as an outfit (or part thereof). Check out our beautiful range of Baby Bare colours here. You will find one to go with every outfit!
Sunday 6 January 2013
Two in Nappies
It was something I had always said I wouldn't do. Two babies in nappies at once. But with a surprise baby and a two year old who is petrified of the toilet/potty, we had very little choice.
When I started out with cloth nappies a big part was saving money. Charlotte was past the newborn stage though, so the frequency of changes had reduced somewhat – I had forgotten how many nappies a new baby can use in one day (or in the space of five minutes).
Enter Emma, at two weeks old and up to fifteen nappy changes a day. Our nappy stash is getting its money's worth. In fact I have had to run to the store room to grab about ten more nappies just to top us up to keep up with her.
Emma is the kind of baby you could go through three nappies in the one attempt to change her. Our nappy pale is full at the end of each day with almost 20 nappies (usually about 17-20).
So when my husband said to me earlier today "You wont believe what's full, AGAIN" I knew instantly he meant the nappy bucket, which it seemed like we had only just washed. I jokingly offered to switch to disposables: "Are you kidding, we'd be broke if we were buying nappies!"
So I thought I'd work out what we are really saving. A good box of nappies is about $33 at the supermarket. For a new born that's about 30c a nappy. In the walker box it's 52c a nappy. At 6 walkers and 12 newborns that's $6.68 a day in nappies.
Then there are disposable wipes. A pack is about $5 with 80-100 wipes in it. At best its 5c a wipe and probably using anywhere from 2-5 wipes at a time. Lets say 10c a change, 20 changes a day. Add another $2 in savings by using our minky cloth wipes (which are better for our girls with sensitive skin and eczema).
Each week we are roughly saving $60.76. Annually that is $3159. In after-tax income, that's a lot out of the family budget. In reality our nappy use will drop off once Emme is past the newborn stage. But we will still use up to 8-10 nappies a day until she is a year old.
I'm sure a lot of people will try to argue this away with the comments about electricity usage in our washing machine and water usage. Yes there are costs involved there. But they are closer to the cost of 1-2 disposable nappies a day. Furthermore, our savings in dollar value does not reflect the saving to the community by not dumping the several kilo's a day of nappies into landfill nor the environmental impact of the factories producing them.
And, honestly, the washing isn't a huge chore either. It's the simple kind of washing that you reach for first whenever you a few different piles to work through. We usually throw the nappy pale straight into the machine with an extra rinse cycle. When they're done, we drape them straight onto a clotheshorse and take them out into the sun.
And one more thing – we have not had any poop leaks from our cloth nappies. In the hospital we had to use the disposables and they leaked all the time. Disposable nappies just do not seem to hold any volume of runny mess from a newborn. The cloth nappies seem to give greater coverage and hold onto it. Well, at least I know our Baby Bare cloth nappies do!
When I started out with cloth nappies a big part was saving money. Charlotte was past the newborn stage though, so the frequency of changes had reduced somewhat – I had forgotten how many nappies a new baby can use in one day (or in the space of five minutes).
Emma is the kind of baby you could go through three nappies in the one attempt to change her. Our nappy pale is full at the end of each day with almost 20 nappies (usually about 17-20).
So when my husband said to me earlier today "You wont believe what's full, AGAIN" I knew instantly he meant the nappy bucket, which it seemed like we had only just washed. I jokingly offered to switch to disposables: "Are you kidding, we'd be broke if we were buying nappies!"
So I thought I'd work out what we are really saving. A good box of nappies is about $33 at the supermarket. For a new born that's about 30c a nappy. In the walker box it's 52c a nappy. At 6 walkers and 12 newborns that's $6.68 a day in nappies.
Then there are disposable wipes. A pack is about $5 with 80-100 wipes in it. At best its 5c a wipe and probably using anywhere from 2-5 wipes at a time. Lets say 10c a change, 20 changes a day. Add another $2 in savings by using our minky cloth wipes (which are better for our girls with sensitive skin and eczema).
Each week we are roughly saving $60.76. Annually that is $3159. In after-tax income, that's a lot out of the family budget. In reality our nappy use will drop off once Emme is past the newborn stage. But we will still use up to 8-10 nappies a day until she is a year old.
I'm sure a lot of people will try to argue this away with the comments about electricity usage in our washing machine and water usage. Yes there are costs involved there. But they are closer to the cost of 1-2 disposable nappies a day. Furthermore, our savings in dollar value does not reflect the saving to the community by not dumping the several kilo's a day of nappies into landfill nor the environmental impact of the factories producing them.
And, honestly, the washing isn't a huge chore either. It's the simple kind of washing that you reach for first whenever you a few different piles to work through. We usually throw the nappy pale straight into the machine with an extra rinse cycle. When they're done, we drape them straight onto a clotheshorse and take them out into the sun.
And one more thing – we have not had any poop leaks from our cloth nappies. In the hospital we had to use the disposables and they leaked all the time. Disposable nappies just do not seem to hold any volume of runny mess from a newborn. The cloth nappies seem to give greater coverage and hold onto it. Well, at least I know our Baby Bare cloth nappies do!
Tuesday 1 January 2013
New Year's Day 2013 – Starting a New Year
2012 has flown by and here we are starting a new year already. Many of us talk about New Year's Resolutions. I'm not really into this. But I have set many goals for 2013.
- Start Blogging – Yay! Done. Well at least this is a start. I aim to Blog about issues relevant to other parents, in particular with cloth nappies as our focus. This blog will explore many of the questions I am asked from parents regarding their nappies with a little bit of sharing my own experiences as a mum.
- Build on Baby Bare – I want our little business to grow. This means more product offerings for our valuable customers. We would like to move into new area's of cloth and new version's of our nappies. Stay tuned for some blogging on these new products over the coming months.
I started Baby Bare to bring to other parents an affordable cloth solution that is great quality, easy to use and looks great. I want to continue to build on this dream. So many parents contact us to say that they are trying to budget nappies into the family finances. I want to continue to offer these families and any one else interested in cloth an affordable way to see their child through to toilet training. - Lose Weight – a personal goal (and a common new years resolution). Having just had a new baby 7 weeks ago, I am keen to drop some of those pesky baby kilos. I hope running around after 2 babies, renovating our house, and running Baby Bare will help in achieving this!
- Spend as much time as possible with my girls – we have two gorgeous girls who you will see featuring as our nappy models. Charlotte is currently 25 months and Emmeline (Emme) is 7 weeks old. In spending more time with my girls I want to toilet train Charlotte and see Emme transition from being a miserable colicky baby to a happy easier going bub. You will probably read more about both of these experiences in the coming months.
Thanks for supporting Baby Bare and I look forward to addressing your questions and sharing my own experiences and points of view with you.
Jenny
Mummy Bare
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