Mother Ease one size Reusable Nappies (Mother-ease One Size)

Member Name: hifromme

Product:	Mother-ease One Size
Date:	05/10/04 (362 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good Fit, Dry quickly, saves money (long term)

Disadvantages: bulkier than disposables

We have thoroughly tested this re-usable nappy system through a ‘nappy lifecycle’. Our daughter was just over 6lb when she was born and she stopped using them at age just over 2 years. Being a bit premature and small initially, the nappies were just too bulky for using straight away. It was a couple of months before we used them and I do recall that after a couple of months in disposable nappies, the re-usable ones seemed very bulky.

We had the usual concerns about whether this would affect her ability to crawl and walk but there seemed to be no adverse affect whatsoever in this regard. In fact, when she started walking, the nappy provided re-assuring extra padding when she fell on her behind!

There are three constituent parts to the nappy:

1. The disposable inner strips (like a large piece of toilet roll), this takes the worst of what your baby has to offer in the nappy department and biodegradable versions can be flushed down the toilet.

2. The towelling like nappy itself with the plastic popper system to adjust the size

3. The ‘external’ pants (also with popper system for adjustable sizing).

The inner strips come on rolls (like large toilet rolls) and are reasonably priced. With the Mother Ease system you can also buy extra rectangle shaped towelling “reinforcing” strips which fix (with poppers) to the inside of the nappy for ‘heavy wetters’ (a bit like towelling sanitary towels!). We didn’t find it necessary to use these and needn’t have bought them.

We found that our daughter would get through 4-6 nappies a day and that we needed 20 of the nappies to keep up with the washing and drying (and soiling!). I think it would be hard to manage with any fewer than this. With the clever popper system of these nappies, the nappy ‘grows’ with your baby which means you only need to buy one set of nappies (unlike other re-usable systems when you need to buy a whole new set after the first year or so).

We had 4-5 of the external pants at a time, one pair generally last a day unless you have an unfortunate ‘exploding nappy’ incident when the outer pants get soiled, this was (mercifully!) very rare in our case. The outer pants come in several sizes (Small, Medium, M/L etc.). We found that it was not necessary to buy each of these sizes, some of the sizes could be skipped and I found it was better to initially buy one of the next size of pants to see whether we could bypass that size and go onto the next one. The outer pants generally went into the standarad 40 degree wash (unless they had been soiled).

The nappies washed well on a 60 degree wash, with an occasional hot wash every now and then when the baby is on solids. We were generally doing 2 nappy washes a week (or 2 every 10 days) and with a modern washing machine, there is little inconvenience to this.

Because the external pants are separate to the nappy, the towelling nappies themselves dry well after washing. This is not the case with other systems where the outer pants are integral to the nappy. However, if it is not the height of summer, a day on the washing line may not be enough to dry the nappies and 15 minutes in a tumble drier can help a lot.

The poppers were very good and as the child gets older, they are not able to unfasten the nappy (as can be the case with velcroe, especially as it becomes fluffy after a few washes). From 2 months to 2 years we found the nappies fitted well and we very rarely had a leak.

We have now put these nappies into retirement but they have done us proud for the last two years. They are undoubtedly much cheaper than disposables and when using disposables on holiday, we were horrified at the amount of rubbish produced and are glad to have saved on two years of such a rubbish level. I would definitely use this system again if we had another child.

Top Tips
The most essential bit of kit for any type of re-usable nappy system is the Net Bag. The Net Bag is a draw string net bag and is used to line the nappy bin so that when it comes to transferring dirty nappies from bin to washing machine, you tighten the net bag and drain the excess water down the bath. Then simply open the net bag, and transfer the bag (containing dirty nappies) into the washing machine. As the machine washes, the nappies find their way out of the bag and are cleaned. Can’t rate the essential nature of this bag enough!

We used a few drops of Tea-Tree oil in the nappy bin, which seemed to work well and is better for the environment than alternatives.

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