A Farewell to Nappies

It comes to us all, that bittersweet moment we’ve been looking forward to, when our last baby is finally out of nappies, not just in the day time but at night too. Hurray! you shout, no more horribly expensive, non-biodegradable, bulky packages cluttering up the shopping trolley. No more worrying about destroying the environment because you couldn’t quite bring yourselves to get into the washable nappy arena, no more smelly nappies to deal with. Just three children who mostly now look after their own toilet requirements. OK, a slightly above average amount of laundry still to do, as though youngest has moved out of nappies there is still the odd night time accident. This is the moment I looked ahead to on the distant horizon, not believing I would ever get there, back when all three of them were simultaneously in nappies, albeit the oldest only at night.

And now? Celebration, fireworks, a big roll of drums? Rather a slightly wistful backward glance as I realise that none of my babies are babies any longer, but are powering on down the road to independance at an alarming rate.

In case you are feeling at all envious of my sweet-smelling, nappy-free house, those of you still in the thick of nappidom, let me just add that our animals are compensating in a big way for our children’s completion of toilet training. Senile Dog, can’t remember why she went to the door, so trundles back through the house generously leaving balls of poo behind in imitation of a muck-spreader. Horror, whose legs are too weak to get out of the window at night has decided that the shower is the best place to relieve herself. Very thoughtful of her, as at least it is easy to scrub down, but now we have provided her with a litter tray I was hoping she would start to use that, so that as I stumble bleary eyed to the bathroom first thing in the morning to wake myself up gradually with a nice warm shower, I don’t have the rude awakening of waving of bottles of disinfectant liberally around the tiled surfaces to get rid of the cat poo.

Finally I just had to share this snippet that didn’t quite warrant a post of its own:

There are some far better product names out there. If only the marketing agencies had some four year-olds on the job:

Blu-tak (that here in SA is called Prestik and for those of you with different branding is the sticky stuff for fixing pictures and postcards to the walls that supposedly doesn’t pull the paint off when you remove it) should actually be known as Glue-Attack. I don’t know why they didn’t already think of it – youngest says Blu-tak is quite wrong and sounds silly.