Help - advice on nappies at nursery? i'm desperate!

hi

was hoping that someone could give me advice/their own experiences of using cloth nappies at nursery?
DD will be going to nursery for 3 days a week and OH will be overseeing this! (while i am working away in another city), so planning is essential!

i've read all the previous relevant posts but i still have a few questions:

1. is it easier for nursery staff simply to use the flush away liner, or would it be okay to use fleece liners? (we use fleece liners at home and i would prefer the fleece option - another way to save money and anyway, DD has sensitive skin)

2. wool... DD will be 7 months when i send her to nursery next month - even at her young age, will it be possible the lovely, expensive wool trousers will get trashed?!?!?! (e.g. sand, paint, baby led weaning...)

3. i'm thinking of investing in flongies - we haven't used these yet... how many pairs would she get through in a day, and (how) is interlock different from/cheaper than wool?

4. i think the advice i will give the nursery staff is: change the nappies every 3 hours; make sure the nappies are quite tight; don't worry if the wool is damp inside (it's meant to be like that) - doesn't need changing. sound good?

5. on the previous posts, some people's advice was to send AIO/pockets with wool, so if there is a leak, the wool will soak it up. i'm a bit reluctant to send several types of nappies for the nursery staff to struggle through. i'm thinking of sending fitteds with wool but i did buy 20 easyfits for the sole purpose of nursery use - they sometimes leak - but they are a lot easier than fitteds.

6. hopefully i'll be sending reusable wipes and a tupperware box (as solution i use camomile tea, olive oil and a squirt of baby bath). has anyone used reusable wipes for nursery and does the tupperware box sound a good idea?

7. i will send several wet bags along with 3 days worth of nappies. i will ask the nursery staff to return the dirty nappies and clothes after each day - sounds good?

many thanks! i'm getting worried about this nursery issue so any advice would be great!

jody xxx

I would send the easyfits and 2 sets of spare clothes. Our nursery changes Leo every 2 hours (not on my request, just what they do). If it leaks then oh well, so do disposables. I wouldn't trust nursery with fitted and wool.

Its easy to say, but don't worry too much as nursery will cope with whatever you give them.

At our nursery the staff take it in turns to do nappies, so it's eaier to give just one type of nappy otherwise there's too many people to teach. we picked side-aplix fitteds with aplix wraps, aplix for their ease and 2-parts for extra protection if one layer isn't quite put on right.

With ds i used fluashable liners, with dd i use minkee liners, nursery are fine with either.

Regarding wool, i personally decided against it. they do lots of painting with supposedly washable paint but i've got quite a few clothes with stains on from it, so i wouldn't trust sending wool. also shaving foam play, which i'm not sure would be good. lots of water play at this time of year so her clothes are dripping. nursery also try to be helpful if clothes get too wet / mucky and stick things in the washer, and i don't trust them to leave the wool out.

fleece is a good idea, although i use it less than i thought i would because the inside of nursery is baking hot so i feel too mean sending her in hot fleece.

we are told to take 1 set of spare clothes per day and 4 nappes. so each day i take the 4 in, then bring home all 4 (they usually use 3 in a day). but that's more so i can keep track of the nappies and know they're not amassing them there.

hope that help with some of your questions

Hi there - though I'd let you know what we've done & the other cloth using mums at our nursery!

1. is it easier for nursery staff simply to use the flush away liner, or would it be okay to use fleece liners? (we use fleece liners at home and i would prefer the fleece option - another way to save money and anyway, DD has sensitive skin)

I sent paper liners to nursery, because that was what I thought they'd prefer (my DS was only the 2nd child there to start using cloth) - but as more & more mums are using them, they are happy to use fleece liners. Just accept a few 'poo parcels' if its a different member of staff changing your LO.

2. wool... DD will be 7 months when i send her to nursery next month - even at her young age, will it be possible the lovely, expensive wool trousers will get trashed?!?!?! (e.g. sand, paint, baby led weaning...)

Never tried it - but we do have 'nursery' clothes. They can get very trashed! We did BLW at nursery - and they didn't use a bib at all - so you can imagine the mess esp with tomato based stuff! Plus there is regular painting etc - it goes everythere! I would buy cheap trousers that wash wash wash!

3. i'm thinking of investing in flongies - we haven't used these yet... how many pairs would she get through in a day, and (how) is interlock different from/cheaper than wool?

Never used these at nursery - again I'm worried about the stuff DS gets down him - but probably better than wool

4. i think the advice i will give the nursery staff is: change the nappies every 3 hours; make sure the nappies are quite tight; don't worry if the wool is damp inside (it's meant to be like that) - doesn't need changing. sound good?

We had problems with this in the beginning - because DS didn't smell when his nappy was wet (like they do in sposies!) So after a few times of picking him up & finding him soaked - I insisted on a minimum number of nappy changes in a day (every 3hrs) unless he did a dirty one which they could obviously smell. Once I explained that wet cloth nappies didn't smell until they were utterly soaked - they were fully on board!

5. on the previous posts, some people's advice was to send AIO/pockets with wool, so if there is a leak, the wool will soak it up. i'm a bit reluctant to send several types of nappies for the nursery staff to struggle through. i'm thinking of sending fitteds with wool but i did buy 20 easyfits for the sole purpose of nursery use - they sometimes leak - but they are a lot easier than fitteds.

We used fitteds & PUL wraps at nursery. My friend had planned to send her DD in pockets specially for nursery - but I took the approach 'I'm paying you a lot of money, you'll change the nappies I have already - because I can't afford to buy special nursery ones' So our workhorse stash of tots bots became our nursery nappies. After an incident with naked messy play & red paint wrecking a yellow wrap - there was no way my lovely minky pockets were going to nursery!!
But now there are loads of children at nursery with different nappy systems - each child's key worker does their own childrens nappy changes - so they get used to what your child uses.

6. hopefully i'll be sending reusable wipes and a tupperware box (as solution i use camomile tea, olive oil and a squirt of baby bath). has anyone used reusable wipes for nursery and does the tupperware box sound a good idea?

DS was allergic to sposie wipes - so they agreed to use their own cloth wipes and water
Other mums have sent small bags of wet wipes - and then the dirty ones go in the dirty nappy bag

7. i will send several wet bags along with 3 days worth of nappies. i will ask the nursery staff to return the dirty nappies and clothes after each day - sounds good?

we took a clean bag of nappies & one clean wet bag every morning
and picked up a full wet bag at the end of the day - repacked it that evening, ready for the following morning.

hope that helps
our nursery use so many cloth nappies now, so it shows it can be done.
just be prepared to be flexible & accept they will make mixtakes in the beginning
(they have managed to put a fitted nappy & PUL wrap on backwards a few times - how??? I have no idea!!)

Good luck!

I used to send fleece liners and just ask them to send poo nappies home for us to deal with (Ryan's poo is awful and doesn't just fall off any liner!) but found that they were scraping the poo off the nappy/liner with my wipes, so I started using paper liners. We don't use those at home, so they are just for nursery.

I use pockets- usually BG and Easyfits but they love his Ittis so I send them sometimes too! I wouldn't send my fitteds with wool, just because of how messy Natalie and Ryan get. But if I didn't own pockets I'd send fitteds and pul wraps. Different people change him each week so it's helped to have the easier nappies.

I send wipes in a small MF wet bag. Ryan goes for 2 days so I tend to do enough for the 2 days and send it Thurs and collect Fri. With the nappies I send 4 each day with 2 changes of clothes and a large wet bag, and at the end of each day I take the wet bag home and send 4 new nappies and a new wet bag the next day.

They change them all at set times each day. Sometimes he leaks, but he does that at home sometimes too. He did a huge messy poo just before I collected him yesterday adn needed his clothes changed...

We used everything at nursery, pockets (they really loved her wee notions ), fitteds, wool, fleece, wraps and all worked just fine - i just made sure i let them know when i dropped her off what nappies she had that day.
Only used paper liners here as dd was allergic to fleece liners.

I've been sending my daughter to nursery for the past 6 months with Easyfits and paper liners. She reacts to disposable wipes so I send in large cotton pads. She's the first in cloth so it threw them for a while but overall things have gone well. Nappies are put in a Monkeyfoot wetbag and taken home every day.

I second the others on sending in clothes you wouldn't be happy to get paint on. I keep trying to tell my husband this as he's the one that normally gets her dressed in the morning. Somehow he can't seem to figure out the system of nursery clothes front of drawer, non nursery clothes back of drawer.

We initially sent LO to nursery in WNSS so they were all the same however as the year has gone on we ended up sending her in fitteds, pockets, fleece or whatever else.
We didn't use paper liners as I didn't want the disposable waste, just use fleece liners like at home.
Fleece is a much better idea than wool due to the ease of washing (wool will likely get trashed and you'll regret it).
We always used reusable wipes too and asked them to change LO every 3hrs.
Our key worker was great as if anything was done wrong or we wanted to change the way things were done she'd pass the message on to everyone else.
Good luck xx