I don't think I really thought all that much about it to be honest, I was going to use cloth and that was that. I didn't see any need to add any more to the rubbish we put out to landfill already. Especially if it wasn't necessary.
I have a friend who used cloth already, she had a little boy and was pregnant with her second child when I was pregnant with Milo, she raved about cloth and well, she is my bestest friend, we're fairly similar, I figured 'if Melly can do it, I can do it'!
I didn't do much research, I assumed that all nappies would be fairly similar (how wrong I was!) and I purchased a newborn and small set of mothercare smart nappies when I was pregnant. As it turned out Milo arrived a little early and quite unexpectedly so I was not ready to use the nappies right away, and ended up using disposables the first few days, but when we came to put the mothercare nappies to use, we were so disappointed in them. I've heard lots of women talk highly of them and use them through to potty training, but for us they were a complete disaster, leaking every single time he wore them.
Having already spent a fair amount of money on cloth nappies that we couldn't use, it took a while to convince ourselves to invest in some more. This time I did a lot of research and discovered a whole world of very confusing nappy names and terms and styles. I used Melly's nappy wisdom along with the cloth nappy group on the baby centre forums to make a some decisions. I purchased a couple of bumgenius one size a Close Parent pop in and a Motherease one size to get an idea of what would work well for us. I actually liked them all, but the motherease were my favourites and I was lucky enough to find a fairly cheap preloved collection of them on ebay that came with 4 tots bots wraps. I then purchased a variety of other wraps to see which I liked the most. The tots bots turned out to be favourite and we've been using those with the motherease ever since. I also still use the bumgenius and the pop ins too. I discovered much later that you can handknit/crochet wraps if you use yarn with a wool content and soak it in lanolin. I've crocheted a couple for Milo, but had I known this before he would probably be in almost entirely handknit nappy covers!
I'm so glad we gave cloth another go, we've never really had any problem with them since those first leaks at the beginning, occasionally overnight they will leak, but then again so do disposables, he's never had any problems with nappy rash and I don't feel it's restricted his movement at all. We don't use cloth as full time as we perhaps could, we tend to have disposables on stand by for emergencies and if we're out for a long time or go away for the weekend, but we try our best to use them most of the time, and it certainly isn't a chore to use cloth over disposables, in fact it's a pleasure. I actually love hanging my nappies out the line on a sunny day, I get great joy from seeing them all pegged out in a row, I'm sure this sounds crazy to non cloth-users, but I have no doubt those who do use cloth know exactly what I mean!
This is such a great opportunity to share with my sister the wonderful world of cloth nappies and I'm so pleased she is getting stuck in to it.
Vicki
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