we're moving home

We are moving bloggy home! This blog has now moved over to here with a new name and everything! Hope to see you over there soon!

Peace, Nat

how do i wash my nappies?

Washing nappies can often be something that puts the dread in prospective mothers. Which is completely understandable! Getting up close and personal to poop ridden nappies and the extra work involved can be the reason that many parents decide to go disposable. Unfortunately, there's nothing that can be done to avoid getting hands on with poo (you won't even escape that with disposables) but using cloth nappies doesn't have to be hard work. A couple of extra loads of washing a week amongst the piles of washing that come with babies and toddlers is like a drop of water in the ocean. Here is the routine that I think has minimal effort for maximum results.

1. Nappies that are just wet come off baby and straight into a dry bucket. No need for wet pailing nowadays with our wonderful modern machines. In fact, wet pailing with a sanitizer like Napisan can actually damage some of the fabrics now used in cloth nappies and drastically reduce their life. 
2. Soiled nappies will need to be rinsed. I recommend using a liner, either disposable or reusable. Personally I have always loved the reusable fleece liners from Little Lamb. They are really soft, keep baby nice and dry and the poo generally just falls off and into the toilet. Disposable liners are great for keeping things simple, reducing the amount of rinsing and washing, but these will be more of an ongoing cost.
3. Its also good practice to remove any boosters or inserts that the nappy may have. Doing this before putting them in the bucket means you don't have to spend so much time fiddling with them when it comes to wash day.
4. I would suggest washing every three days. You really don't want to leave them any longer than this! If you have fewer nappies you may need to wash more regularly, but I'm going for minimal effort here! To save handling them all again you could line the bucket with a mesh laundry bag. Leave it open when you put it in the machine then the nappies can escape when they are in the wash. If you are finding that smaller items, like liners, are getting stuck in the door seal you may need to put these in a separate, closed laundry bag.
5. My machine makes things very easy for me. I have a lot of options for customising the cycle, which I love by the way! But I understand not everybody has this function so you may need to adjust what you do in the next few steps. Either way, always start with a cold rinse! It will help keep both stains and smells at bay.
6. After this you want to do a regular 40 degree wash with half the amount of powder and extra rinses at the end. Your machine may have an "extra rinse" button somewhere, or, like mine, you can adjust the number of rinses to whatever you want. I program in two extra rinses, bringing the total number of rinses at the end to four. It may be that you need to go and put it on a couple extra rinse cycles. However you need to do it, make sure that there are no bubbles floating around on the last rinse. Left over bubbles means bad news for both the nappies and baby.
7. Now your nappies should be clean and fresh smelling, ready to dry. You don't want them smelling like soap, there shouldn't be any soap residue left over (hence the extra rinses). Line drying is preferable (sun is great for nappies!) but tumble drying on a low heat is ok for some nappies, please check the manufacturers instructions.

And there you have it! I hope to write up a few more posts about other aspects of nappy care soon but in the mean time I hope somebody out there finds this helpful.

You can get 10% off the above mentioned products and many more at The Nappy Gurus by following this reference link. And you can help me out at the same time, win win!

Peace, Nat

on our shelves this week

One of the things I've just started to organise for Little Bean is some Montessori shelf work. Maria Montessori very famously said "Play is the work of the child" (see this link for more info). Work can appear to be a strange word when applied to the world of a toddler. But in reality children and toddlers are almost always working, always learning, always developing. It is maybe just not always recognised as work by us big people. So with that said, here's what we have on our shelves this week. I change things as Little Bean gets bored with them and always follow her lead as to what she seems interested in. Little Bean is almost 21 months.

A little practical life activity to start us off. Little Bean is really into dressing and using fasteners at the minute. She has the firm belief that she is able to do most things herself and is very clear when she wants to try! So, a normal toddler there then. As she is so interested in dressing, and I don't have any dressing frames, I thought I would put this little doll on the shelves. She starts of dressed, then Little Bean unfastens the velcro, removes her clothes, then places them in the box. She then puts the doll and the box back on the shelf (sometimes) and at some point I put her clothes back on. Little Bean will work at this once or twice most days.

We always have a little box of musical instruments out, she never tires of using these. The tommee tippee cup is an easy homemade maraca, it's just filled with rice.

This is a cute bus she got for Christmas from the grandparents. It is the only colour matching activity that has any interest for her at the moment, she matches up the little people to the right coloured seat. She has just started looking at the numbers and matching them instead (she is crazy about numbers and counting right now).

I got these lovely number flashcards from Mr Printables. Let me first just say that I do not sit Little Bean down and quiz her about numbers! So I don't use these as flashcards would ordinarily be used. They simply sit on the shelf and we look at them (if she wants to) much like we would look at a book with numbers. She can recite numbers 1 to 10 and can count items up to 4, which is why I only have numbers 1 to 4 out. I was hoping it would help her visualise each number as a quantity and would help her connect the symbols with the quantities. But I don't push it. In a Montessori school, children would be exposed to a number of sensorial materials and number rods (I'll maybe talk a bit about these at a later date) before they work on this sort of a concept. So I was actually reluctant to have these out, but she seemed so set on counting things I thought she would probably like them. When she saw me laminating them she wanted to look at them straight away!

That's all we have out for now. We have very limited space so I can't put a lot out. But she helps out a lot around the house, lots of practical life activities there!

Peace, Nat

introducing....montessori

The Montessori Method is something else that came into my life with the advent of parenthood. On the whole, it doesn't have a very big profile in the UK (where I live). I first came across it in the US, the son of a friend of ours was attending a Montessori school. That's what peaked my interest. Since Little Bean turned one I have been reading a lot about Montessori and I have discovered it's a wonderful, respectful, child-led, holistic method for facilitating learning. However, Montessori is so much more than a philosophy for education (although it is one we intend to use when homeschooling Little Bean), it has become a philosophy for living. Hopefully you are interested in knowing more because below I have collected together some links to sites that I found helpful in my search to find out more.

Living Montessori Now has a helpful post with some basic Montessori principles and another one with lots of links about the prepared environment for a toddler.

The Kavanaugh Report has a post about their Montessori playroom and couple of posts about what Montessori might look like with a toddler, see here and here.

A recently added blog post at Natural Beach Living gives a good overview of the theory behind Montessori.

Our Montessori Home has a great post on the Montessori lifestyle.

Peace, Nat.

fluffy bum

Now I'm talking Fairy Liquid baby, cotton based fluffy bum, not, well, whatever the alternative would be! That's right, cloth nappies. When I first started looking into cloth nappies, I pretty much thought there was one type and I would just find out where to get them and then buy some. So naive! What I thought would be an easily navigated path to financial and environmental sustainability turned into a wade through a confusing swamp of information. I still occasionally find myself sinking somewhat, despite three years of (at times obsessive) research and two years of hands on experience. Do I regret the decision I made? Not at all! I love my, sorry, Little Bean's nappies and let me tell you why.

1 - better for baby
What better reason does a person need! Disposable nappies are filled with all sorts of plastics and scary chemicals. Polyacrylic acid is a Super Absorbent Polymer, it's so absorbent that it has been found to draw moisture from poor baby's skin leading to nappy rash and bleeding. It has also been banned from use in tampons due to its connection with Toxic Shock Syndrome and employees working with the stuff can suffer from female organ damage, fatigue and weight loss. Despite all this, no long term studies have been carried out to check the risks to babies who are exposed to it 24/7 in the form off a super absorbent, super convenient nappy. Tribulytin, another substance found in disposables, is known to negatively affect both the immune and hormonal systems. And these are put in a product which is then placed next to the most sensitive and absorbent part of the body. No wonder that a study by Proctor and Gamble found that incidences of nappy rash rose from 7% to 61% when disposable nappies became the norm.

2 - better for the environment
The best (and only positive) thing about disposable nappies is that they can go from baby's bum straight in the bin, easy peasy. But where do they go from there? The same place most of our household waste goes, landfill. Disposable nappies make up an estimated 355,000 tonnes of waste per year, costing local authorities £32 million per year for the convenience of binning it. That's not the end of the nappy though. According to the Women's Health Network, it will take 200-500 years for a disposable to decompose. That's a lot of nappies hanging around for  heck of a long time! And those nasty chemicals and plastics that we talked about earlier, they end up in the earth and in the water cycle.

3 - better for the purse
Of course less nappies going in the bin also means less nappies to buy. A baby will need approximately 2000 nappies per year. With most babies potty training between the ages of 2 and 3 they could be going through anything from 4000 to 6000 nappies in their pre toileting lives. The average disposable costs 16p, amounting to between £640 to nearly £1000 spent on nappies. Nappy for nappy cloth does cost more than a disposable but I reckon I spent between £200 and £300 on my stash, saving at least £340. As a parent, it's not like I don't have better things to spend my money on.

So there you have it, the lowdown on why I decided to go cloth and fluff up my baby.

Information for this post was found at Go Real nappy information service, the Really Pants blog and this BBC News article.

You can get 10% off at The Nappy Gurus by following this affiliate link. And you can help me out at the same time, win win!

Peace, Nat.

one really long adventure.

Little adventures. Life is full of them, like learning to crochet, or trying to pass a driving test. Sometimes we get the chance to embrace a big adventure, like travelling across the United States. About a year and a half ago I embarked on my biggest adventure to date. That of bringing into the world another human being and trying to guide them through life. It has already been quite a ride.

Said little person (we will call her Little Bean) is now a few months away from being two and is a delightful and carefree ball of loveliness. She is happy, loving, fun and throws herself into life headfirst, only stopping to think about it afterwards. Parenting is certainly turning out to be a truly delightful adventure. Hence the reason for resurrecting this long abandoned blog, it seemed a fitting space to share our adventures.

Peace, Nat.

he finally writes

Well i'll be honest, it was never among my aspirations to be a blogger, but alas marriage leads us to places we can never imagine, so here goes peters firs blog entry...

well somehow i have become a 'visiting research scholar'. you just get adjusted to one far-to-grown-up-sounding title (like husband or postgraduate student) and then 'they' give you another one.

so yes i am visiting, we are not going to stay although we have felt so welcome here among the mennonites, and the rent is cheaper and the weather better and the mexican food nicer etc. regardless, we will be leaving here in about 5 weeks, which has, predictably enough, really snuck up on us.

i am doing research, which for me looks like trying to arrange interviews with members of local churches, interviewing said members, and trying to read anything in the library that looks like it could have anything to do with mennonites and communion. i have really really enjoyed interviewing folks about their experience of communion, it has been a real privilege and insight into lives i would never had encountered otherwise. that is especially true with the older folks who i have interviewed hearing about how it was back in the 1940's or 50's, its amazing how a lifetime can span so much change. what will i be reminiscing about to some young thing, who's parents have not even been born yet, in 2062. will that world make any sense to me, anyway i am being distracted, so yes interviews are good, i would recommend them to a friend.

scholar, well that makes me uncomfortable, i dont think i am a scholar any more than i have been since i began this institutional educational journey back in byron court primary school back in the days of thatcher, big glasses and the first gulf war.
some things to share. nat will have mentioned that we are staying at a mennonite seminary, so this is where they train pastors and theologians and leaders and stuff but what i love is the relaxed atmosphere, folk laugh with and live with and know each other, there are lots of social space in the main buildings to sit and chat, there are plants that a local guy comes to water every tuesday, and this:

this is an institution that has embraced and funded theological toilet humor, that is special (see  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realized_eschatology and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatology if the humourous aspect remains elusive) 

i like that because its silly and i think a capacity for the silly is an important marker of maturity. Father save us from the serious ones who have lost the love of laughter, amen.
well i think that is enough of that for now.

in other matters, i have become proficient at hula hooping with my neck, 

at enjoying 'fall' colours, (the building in this pic is out apartment block)

 at recognising stereotypical mid-west scenes,

and i am getting the hang of quilting.