Packing light with a ten month old…
I find that getting ready to leave the house can sometimes be a challenge, so preparing for an extended holiday in Thailand with our then to be ten month daughter seems like an endless journey of research into what best to take, how best to approach travelling, and the resulting stream of amazon deliveries.
In light of this I've broken down the components of our travel packing for a month in the tropics into the following sections.
Nappies, dining, sleeping and packing.
Nappies
Let's kick off with what was a main concern of mine and that's nappies. At home we use disposables. It's bothered me for a while that we use them and so if anything this trip was a definite motivation to switch to reusables. I thought it would be a simple decision however once you go down the rabbit hole of reusables nappies it's a seemingly confusing world with mixed messages.
Firstly, traveling or not, are reusables better for the planet? This was a big driver for me to use them at home. Well there's arguments for and against when considering the effect of carbon emissions due to washing and drying compared to putting nappies into a landfill. Personally I feel much better about washing and either line drying or drying on radiators in the winter than shipping nappies off to a third world country to fester for the next millennia. I also feel much better about getting away from the amount of chemicals I'm subjecting Milla's beautiful pure bum to, by using natural organic materials. So carbon emissions aside it's a thumbs up to reusables from me. Saying that though which reusables were best for our traveling purposes was another minefield. I won't go through all the options available as I'm sure if you've found this blog post you're already into your own research. I'll merely share the conclusions and performance in practice of the decisions I made.
Here's a list of what nappies we ended up packing...
3 x Flip Stay Dry Insert
3 x Flip Daytime Organic insert
1 x Hemp Babies Flat Weeds
2 x Flip Nappy Cover
18 x Flip Disposable Inserts
5 x Three Little Imps Cloth Nappy Bamboo Charcoal inserts
2 x Beaming Baby Reusable Nappy and inserts
Half way through the trip, and so far so good - no upset tummies (balls I’ve said it now..), and here’s the conclusions to date.
The real winners for me so far have been the Flip nappies. These nappies have a waterproof outer shell which can be reused a couple of times (life saver) to house an inner pad or two of your choice. I started with the flip stay dry inserts which seemed to have okay absorbency, however as the journey progressed I switched to the charcoal bamboo inserts that I bought on Amazon. They were cheap and they’re great. So for night times I use a combo of the Hemp Babies Flat Weeds and a charcoal bamboo on top. The first time we dressed Milla in this combo I was as little distressed as she couldn’t get her legs together poor girl. I was worried that she wouldn’t be able to roll over in bed having a car tyre round her gusset. But it was all fine. She coped with it much better than me!
In the day I just used a charcoal bamboo with a biodegradable liner to catch the poo. It’s not fail safe, and I have ended up sluicing on a few occasions! Not ideal but really no big drama to date. Milla isn’t a massive wetter so I’m sure this is all dependent on your baby. This combo is just working well for us.
The thing with the reusables whilst travelling is getting into your nappy routine. There’s clearly a lot of washing to do, however we haven’t found it overwhelming. We just don’t plan to get out too early as we need to get the night time nappies washed, dried and ready for the evening swap over. It all sounds dull as anything right?.. and reading this before I had a kid and got on the road would’ve turned me a bit cold. However now having a baby and all the things that they come with, it’s all fine to plan our day a little differently, and whilst nappies are being washed, Milla is getting ready for the day ahead, so no real time lost.
The Beaming baby nappy which is an all in one has come in really handy for when Mills has gone through two outer shells in quick succession and so I need a back up. Or I need a quick night time nappy change. Both these instances have been fairly rare but it’s been great to have the option and so I’d pack it again.
The inserts I haven’t really used are the Flip daytime organic inserts, however these may come into their own as Milla gets bigger.
The disposable Flip inserts and the Aldi disposables are great to give me peace of mind that for long journeys and for any upset tummies I have a quick plan. I’ve yet to test this fully and really hope not to! Right now I have the disposables allocated to travel days and the day before travel days so that I don’t need to pack smelly wet contraband.
It may all seemingly read like an utter ball ache to be doing these type of household chores whilst in paradise, but give me this freedom any day over trying to find enough disposables every place you land and be reliant on what the local outlets sell... should there be any.