Reuseable baby wipes

Another part of the nappy equation is the wipes you use. I use washable baby wipes - partly for eco reasons and partly because it means exposing the baby to fewer additives. (The Waterwipes website has a long and fairly sobering list of ingredients in baby wipes that are potential skin irritants.)

Wendyl Nissen at Green Goddess has a recipe for deluxe DIY baby wipes involving witchhazel and rosewater. I was keen to try her recipe when I first had the baby but could only find the ingredients in ethanol with preservatives, which seemed to defeat the purpose! (In her latest book, Mother's Little Helper, Wendyl recommends sourcing the witchhazel from health shops and food-grade rosewater from Indian or Middle Eastern food shops, not the chemists'.)

I wound up just using plain water, which seems to work fine. At first I used paper towels, but they were hard to peel apart when wet and tended to tear. My partner's bright idea was to use thin kitchen wipes cut into sections instead (Wendyl suggests using Chux cloths). I wet and squeeze out the wipes and layer them in a re-purposed plastic takeaway container ready for use:

There's no need for any preservative because I just make them up fresh every day or two so they don't get a chance to go musty. Used ones just get tossed in the nappy bucket to get washed and line dried with everything else.

Now the baby is beyond the newborn stage I use a combination of disposable wipes and these ones - disposable wipes for cleaning up poo and these for when baby is just wet and not dirty.* (Yeah, I'm a little wimpy about poo!) It's another compromise - my partner prefers to use the disposable wipes, and who am I to discourage him from changing nappies? - but I save at least half a dozen wipes a day so I reckon it's worth it.

I really like it when I change a wet nappy and don't have to throw a single thing away. 

*Or, as my partner would say, "there's just a fart's worth of poo".