Firstly, there's the sniff test. Don't deny it, we've all done it. You're at Baby Music group, or chatting to another mum over coffee, and you've a sneaking suspicion that the odour permeating the conversation is coming from your little darling. What do you do? Start the laborious process of removing layers of clothing without invoking the wrath of your child, or simply lift them into the air and sniff the nappy region? The latter, obviously. My core screams "euughhh", but the now-seasoned mummy in me says "perfectly practical".
Secondly there's the type of nappy. I wrote many months ago about my aspirations to stop Baby Badger from winning the battle of Baby vs The World. We started off as evil/convenient as we could be: a popular brand of disposable nappies (partly because they were the only ones that did a size small enough for our tiny daughter) together with one of those magic bins that seals the soiled nappies away in what looks like a string of plastic sausages. Non-degradable nappies double-sealed in plastic. Cringe.
Since then we've moved onto supposedly better disposables, in this case Bambo Nature nappies. They claim to be fully degradable, although I'm not sure whether the tabs will actually break down. A rival of theirs, Moltex, have actually been proven to be fully degradable to the extent that one city council (I think Leicestershire) have agreed to take the nappies in their compost bins. Of course, that did mean we stopped using the magic nappy sausage machine as there's no point wrapping degradable nappies in impervious plastic; we now use degradable bags.
Our final step was to cloth nappies, prefolds (which, confusingly, aren't the nappies that are folded to look like disposables). We are doing it the yuppy way - we found a laundry service. Once a week they pick up the soiled nappies and drop off a bag of nice clean ones. I tell myself that it's far more hygenic and environmentally friendly for the nappies to be washed and dried in bulk (which may be true) but obviously I'm doing it to avoid the yuck factor! If we go away or out on a long day out we revert to the eco-disposables, but generally we're using the cloths and I feel very virtuous! It's been going well for the last four months and I intend to continue.
Finally, we come to the real fascination... the nappy contents. Poo! Yes, I said it! When Baby Badger was young, the fascination was checking that poo was frequent enough. I was terrified that after her shaky start she might not be feeding enough, so I counted daily nappies, assessed their weight. Yum. Now that she's piling on the pounds I don't worry about that. No poo for five days? No problem... just brace yourself for the poonami when it arrives.
Now that we're on solid food, the fascination is in what's coming out. Is it liquid and yellow, like breastfed poo? If so, she's obviously not been eating much for a few days. Has she been chewing? Definitely not in the case of peas, but strangely yes with sweetcorn kernels (or at least the majority of them). Why does banana poo look like worms - it's very disturbing! Is the black bit olive, mushroom or aubergine? How many days does it take for a piece of chicken to come out the other end? I've not yet attempted beetroot, mainly because we'll probably have to throw away whatever she's wearing, but partly because when it "appears" three days later I'll have forgotten what it is and end up at A&E in a panic!
This post is part of the Poo Carnival over at Notes From Home. Why not head over there now and see who else joined in?
Image: tungphoto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
