When you’re pregnant (for the first time at least) you have lots of Good Intentions. 1/ I will not co-sleep with my baby 2/ I will only let organic, home-cooked food pass their lips 3/ I will use only re-usable nappies. Well, lets just say, at 4am I would have slept on a railway track with Country Bebe (CB) if it meant we both got some zzzz’s; CB is clinically addicted to Petit Filous and nappies… yep, disposable from day one.
Second-time mums will be sniggering at my well-meaning but rather idealistic intentions. For the first three months or so it is pure survival people. Pure survival. We are coming out the other side of ‘have I even brushed my teeth today?’ and with CB finally in his groove there is one of these Good Intentions that I wanted to redress: The re-usable nappy. Namely as this fact haunts me with every bum change: every disposable nappy that has EVER BEEN MADE is still in existence, yep, not ONE has degraded. That’s probably because each one takes 500 years, wrapped in a plastic nappy sack it’s basically a permanent little toxic bomb. Not cool.
Okay, hair shirt rant over. Let’s face it, we all want to recycle/eat organic/hug trees, but when it comes to mums and their nappy buying it comes down to three things: comfort, practicality/efficacy and cost.
Enter gNappies. I think they have honed the perfect hybrid between the disposable and the reusable nappy.
Basically the system works with a colourful, soft jersey outer (the gpants if you will). It has super comfy wide leg bands and velcro fasteners much like a disposable and comes in some really cool colours. Inside is a waterproof nylon pouch, into which you insert a plastic-free, biodegradable, disposable liner. That’s it. It takes no longer to change than a disposable. You can even get cloth liners if you want the whole thing to be 100% re-usable. We just stick the disposable liner in one of these corn starch Naty nappy sacks, making it 100% biodegradable.
You can even sling wet ones on the compost heap and they’ll be gone in 50-150 days (a bit swifter than a disposable at 182,500 then).
Comfort
The gNappy is no more bulky than a disposable, if you’re imagining an unwieldy Terry nappy, don’t.
When we first roadtested the gNappy I think we put it on too tight (I secretly didn’t trust it’s poo-catching capacity) and it left CB with some sore marks but we soon got the hang of it. The velcro tabs fasten backwards which takes a little getting used to but it means that little fingers can’t undo them. Clever.
Practicality/efficacy
Okay, so what all mums want to know, does it catch the poo? I’d say versus a super dry disposable you’ll need to change wet ones more frequently, we found CB soaked through his gNappy a lot quicker than a disposable (2 hours or so), but on the number two front it caught them all. No probs. No leaks, mess, nothing.
When we did have to wash the gNappy both the waterproof insert and the outer gpants both went straight in the washing machine at 40 degrees and dried on the radiator in under 30 mins. Even the thick waistband. I’d definitely recommend getting 3 of the gpants (£14.95 each), one to wash, one to wear and one spare.
Cost
Okay, so the disposable inserts are 32 for £9.95, yes more expensive than disposables (around 52 for £10) but at just over 30p each I still think, a bargain. If you want to go down the cloth route these are £22.95 for six.
For us, they’re a winner. Can you tell?
