Choosing Your Nappies

Claire Jones-Hughes is mum to one charming 2 year old daughter, second baby is due any day now and "lucky to be married to a very good man". A keen blogger she lives in Brighton, East Sussex and is known on her blogs and twitter as 'Contented Mummy' (@contentedmummy). Her big passions are family days out, enjoying wine time with friends & without children, music and striving for the elusive work/ life balance as before maternity leave, she worked full-time. Claire also runs an on-line community at www.brightonmums.com with another mum.

Although we've used washable nappies before we probably only ended up using them 50% of the time with our first daughter. Our second baby is due at the end of this month and this time we've decided to use them from birth, 100% of the time.


There were a few simple factors in why we've decided to use washable nappies more than we did for our first, economics and the environment being the biggest. We are acutely aware, as a growing family, our impact on the environment will increase, so need to make more of an effort to be green. But also with our growing family, we need to keep our household costs trim and cutting back on the nappies seemed an obvious way to save case. Plus disposables have their drawbacks too. They are not always the most comfortable for small babies becoming lumpy and awkward when full. Some brands don't fit all babies at every stage of their growth and are prone to leaking, especially with poo explosions!


With our eldest, we bought a set of used FuzziBunz nappies from a friend. Although a perfectly acceptable product, in true 'first-time parent' fashion we lacked the confidence to use them 100% of the time. Usually at night or when we went out of the house for longer than a few hours, we would use disposables. After speaking to a few friends who have been braver with washable nappies, I realised how many different brands there are on the market and they are all good for different situations. I then hooked up with Cheeks and Cherries, their website guided us through the process of choosing the right nappies. This time I thought about some of the concerns I had from our first time round:


- Newborn: the nappies I used before seemed really large and uncomfortable, so I wanted to choose some in a small size for those first few months.


- Lifestyle: what kind of activities will we be doing the most of? What would work best during the day at home or while out?


- Night-time: what were my main concerns about night-time wetting before?


- Washing & care: what would be the easiest to use and clean? With a newborn and a toddler to care for, we need products that are low maintenance to wash and dry.


The difference between buying washables versus disposables if you do have to spend time researching and choosing the right selection for your and your family. But that makes sense, as it's a one-off cost, one-off exercise which with disposables you still end up doing but more as you go along, weighing up brands and sizes as the baby develops. With washables, many nappies are exceptionally well designed to fit babies of different builds and sizes from the start, so you can relax - one thing to tick off your list! We chose the following brands:




Bambooty Easy Dry



Bambooty Easy Dry in the small size. They are slimline and incredibly delicate in structure, perfect for tiny babies.





The Close Parent Pop In Bamboo , all-in-one nappy style, one size. They look a little bigger for newborns but the reputation for absorbency, especially with the booster insert would be ideal for those first few months, with the short sleep bursts, frequent feeding and wetting.

Close Parent - Pop-In - Bamboo

itti bitti - bitti tutto , all-in-one nappy style, one size. Another popular nappy with parents, they come with soft, fluffy outers in a range of colours and patterns plus have a highly praised 'poo fence' mechanism to help cope with tricky soiling incidents.



itti bitti - bitti tutto



BumGenius V4.0 with poppers, 'pocket' style nappies, one size. These seem to come out as the most versatile nappy throughout the baby's development from birth. On appearance they seem quite large for little babies but that doesn't concern me overall, as they don't stay that petite newborn size for long!

BumGenius V4 - Snaps



Overall, I wasn't expecting these nappies to be so easy to figure out how to use, to be so soft, almost like another garment. My first impressions have already boosted my confidence to get stuck in from the first moment i need to use a nappy on my pending arrival. We have less than two weeks to go till my due date and are as ready as we'll ever be.



Do cloth nappies work in the real world?

Do Cloth Nappies Work In The Real World?

Article published in www.daisygreenmagazine.co.uk this week!

At 36 weeks pregnant with my third baby, my sister called me and announced she was going to send me some cloth nappies to trial when my new son arrived.

I tried to sound politely interested, but mentally filed in the ‘yeah right, too much work’ bin.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to be the greenest parent I could be. I had used ‘eco-disposables’ with my first two children. I searched out baby toiletries full of nice natural ingredients and no sodium laureth sulfate.

I used to hang out at the Green Baby shop in Islington, swooning over the organic, fair-trade moses baskets and swaddling blankets. I religiously bought local, seasonal organic veggies to puree for my precious babies’ first foods… Oh yes, I wanted to be green, and organic and the best mummy I could.

But cloth nappies? Purlease. Soaking, pinning, washing and drying? No thanks. I was a mummy of the Noughties, not the Fifties.

I had been a career girl, an ex-advertising exec with a shoe collection to prove it. I wasn’t about to start spending my days swishing poo soup in a bucket.

Baby arrived. Blissfully, at home, in water (another story). And the cloth nappies arrived too.

Cute, they were. Teeny tiny, soft little things, shaped just like a disposable nappy, and not much bigger either. They fastened with Velcro or poppers. Kind of easy, actually. And very fabulous patterns on the outside. Soft and furry, with Dalmatian spots all over them. One with little sailing boats all over it. Daddy liked this one. Another with the Very Hungry Caterpillar and his cherry pie round the waistband. I liked this one so much I took pictures of the new arrival in it to send to my sister.

Performance-wise, no major leaks. And best of all… poo explosions kept under control. No right-up-to-the-neck mustard poo accidents. Literally, none, which was an unexpected bonus.

And then, revelation! Washing was easy. No soaking at all! No poo soup!

I popped the few I had in the washing machine with some dirty towels and dishcloths. Washed at 30 degrees with half my normal amount of liquid, and they came out completely clean, smelling lovely, and ready to dry and use again.

I couldn’t believe it… how had I been so stubborn and foolish about this for so long? These would save me a fortune (mentally I bought the shoes a £500 saving over 3 years would bring me).

I would also be rid of that awful nagging guilty feeling I had every time I wrapped up a soggy piece of paper (and sometimes, chemicals) in a small plastic nappy bag and threw it away.

And so it began… scouring the internet for more of these amazing things with their funny names: Fuzzi Bunz, Cushie Tushies, TotsBots, Bimbles and Bumhuggers… where to start with purchasing more? Which should I buy next?

Before I knew it, a full-blown addiction had developed. Non-parents, and non-cloth nappy users will think I have truly lost my marbles here. Let me tell you, though, that there is little in life more satisfying of some long-buried deeply-held maternal instinct, than wrapping your precious little one’s soft and pure little bottom, in an equally soft and pure fluffy nappy.

A quick google search of some of the cloth nappy forums will confirm that this is a properly addictive pursuit. As I realised, after I moved on from plain old (but still adorable) fluffy bamboo nappies, to tracking down one-of-a-kind sumptuous, cushiony, hand-embroidered items made from organic bamboo velour. As a friend put it, “wearing one of those must be like peeing into a pillow”.

But addiction aside, the rational side of me became more convinced, the more searching I did too. I realised that some of my assumptions about the disposable versus cloth nappy debate had been misinformed.

For example, for years, I had kept in the back of my mind the Environmental Agency report that had apparently found little difference in the environmental impact of disposables and washable nappies. Any time my sister had mentioned cloth before now, I had cited it to her.

But now, having actually done some research of my own, I found to my shame, that it wasn’t what I thought. It’s a complicated subject, for another time, perhaps, but the sum of it is this:

The environmental impact of a disposable is fixed.

But you can lower the impact of a washable nappy substantially by laundering them normally.

That is, mainly at 30 degrees, line-drying wherever possible and not ironing.

(I only mention the ironing, because it’s one of the key assumptions in the EA report. Let me assure you though, nobody irons modern cloth nappies – it’d melt the waterproof layer in most of them for a start)

However, we aren’t saints, by any means, and we do use disposables still. But our general philosophy on this, and all green issues is that every little helps.

Even just one single cloth nappy a day will save on average over 1000 disposables going to landfill. We did our own little survey on cloth nappy users, and almost everyone uses the odd disposable alongside their reusables, to a greater or lesser extent.

Disposables can be a great solution when you’re in a fix. Stuck in a jam on the way to the grandparents? Sure, bung a disposable on.

But they don’t have to be used all the time, 24/7/365. Just as we buy kitchen towel paper, and fabric dishcloths too, there’s no reason why we can’t use both types of nappy interchangeably… even though the fabric nappy is more cost-effective, and arguably more environmentally-friendly too.

The whole reusable nappy market is seeing a new resurgence since the advent in the last five years of these amazingly functional, and beautiful modern cloth nappies, that are comfortable, cute and incredibly easy to care for.

And the dreaded extra washing? Well, honestly, I barely notice it. A family of five generates a lot of laundry, and the nappies are the least of it.

I guess I would say that though, since as a result of our own search for clear information and the ultimate reusable nappy, we started our own online reusable nappy boutique: www.cheeksandcherries.co.uk.

If you have a baby, or are pregnant, try just one, though, and make your own mind up.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you though.