Katy and baby Ada

Katy lives in Homerton and has volunteered for the network since the birth of her son Harper in 2005. With the recent arrival of her daughter Ada, Katy shares her experiences of using real nappies second time around:

Why do you use real nappies? I hate the thought of contributing all those disposable nappies to landfill and I know exactly what real nappies are made of. Oh and money saving is great too.Which is your favourite nappy? I mostly use the Motherease brand – their Sandys nappies are natural cotton, absorbent and fairly quick drying. Their wraps are the most reliable I know of (though they could do with bringing out some more interesting prints). I’ve tried quite a few other types, but always end up coming back to Motherease. At night, we use A Mama Knows bamboo nappies and wool wraps to go over the top – these work by the lanolin in the wool helping to contain any moisture, whilst being breathable – no leaks so far! We found that paper liners caused a rash for Ada, so switched to fleece liners and have had no problems.

Any washing, drying or stain removal tips? As we live in such as hard water area, we use 1/2 soda crystals and 1/2 powder detergent. This seems to really help soften the water in the wash and means that nappies aren’t getting a build up from using too much detergent. And SUNSHINE (finally we have some!) is bar far the best stain remover, I’m always happily surprised at how it bleaches out all stains.

Can you share your experiences of early potty training? At around 10 weeks, we started to experiment with early potty training. I was rather skeptical at first, but I’m now often able to read Ada’s signals (a certain squirm, or pulling off the breast when feeding) that she needs to go. I hold her on the loo seat and make a little grunting noise – and then she tends to empty her bowels. Amazing! I’ve started doing the ‘pss pss’ noises for when she goes for a wee too, so she’ll start to associate this with going to the loo.