Talk to me about reusables please!

[thepartysover]

My questions are mainly over smell and staining.

• surely every time the nappy pail gets opened it unleashes an unholy stench?

• doesn't everything get incredibly stained, especially liners / wipes? Or is there some miracle solution that bibbity bobbity boos them back to being white?

We already use cheeky wipes for lots of things but they have ended up stained and pretty awful to look at.

Any advice very welcome!

I didn't cloth from birth, gradually phased it in after 10 weeks (EMCS and bad recovery).

Next time I'm planning to phase in from birth but mix with disposables. Remember every cloth one used is one less disposable.

We only recently introduced cloth at around 14 weeks as I thought it might be too much for us for a first baby from birth. Actually I think it would have been fine (and probably actually easier than now as DP was home for a month and doing all the laundry ) but I thought they would be a lot more faff than they actually are. In reality, it hasn't caused much more washing as we were having a couple of outfit changes a day due to leaks with disposables.

I used little lamb microfibre nappies. Came out the machine virtually dry! I used 100% biodegradable flushable liners which caught the bulk of the waste. Used napisan which detergent and never had staining. The pail did smell sadly but was emptied/cleaned daily. Xx

We didn’t cloth from day 1 either. We hired a kit from our local nappy library at 2 weeks and bought our own and used them exclusively from 6 weeks-by which time she was big enough for birth to potty ones (even though they made her bum look adorably huge! We plan to give ourselves a couple of weeks grace when no. 2 arrives later this year as well.

We used close parent pop-ins with fleece liners and have been very pleased with them. As other posters have said, sunlight is the best stain remover! For winter and rain we had a heated airer from Lakeland which was a godsend. We used a big wet bag to store before washing and it didn’t stink when closed. Sometimes I put some essential oil in the bottom before we started using it which helped.

It's a good call to take the pressure off in the early days... also gives you a chance to see what size / shape baby you have before committing to a particular brand or system. I was amazed how different my first two were in terms of shape.