Teething and colds hit babies at the same time, although Science says there’s no link. So what I’ve been assuming was the worsening of teething pains, turns out in fact to have been the onset of a cold; if it’s anything like the one that Pete and I are just developing, then Bernard has been suffering from a sore throat, and feeling lousy, for a few days now. Poor lamb.

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It’s a while since I’ve written anything about nappies, which is a little odd because I never shut up about them in the real world. When it was my turn to host the NCT mums for coffee, I invited the local Nappy Lady along to try and make a few converts.

But I’m not here to write about my love for cloth nappies today, I’m here to mull over the latest promotion for Pampers, who have pledged that:

For every pack of Pampers nappies purchased during November and December, Pampers will donate the funding equivalent to one tetanus vaccination to UNICEF for distribution to the most vulnerable mothers through UNICEF’s immunisation programmes.

Now here’s a dilemma: vaccinations are obviously a good thing for the planet; disposable nappies less so. I’m uninformed about any disadvantage of immunising mothers against tetanus, so I’ll assume that UNICEF know what they’re doing, and any sciencey readers can feel free to discuss the concept below.

Meanwhile, let’s do some maths [which as you know is also a vague area for me; oh boy am I out of my depth tonight].

November plus December = two months = eight weeks Two packs of nappies a week^[1] for eight weeks = sixteen packs of nappies One tetanus immunisation costs 2.5 pence 16 x 2.5 = 40 That’s 40 [forty] pence.

That’s 40 [forty] pence donated by Pampers; and sixteen packs of nappies, mummified in stinky nappy sacks, consigned to landfill forever. Cost to the consumer? Over £140.

There’s not much point me banging on about the cost to the planet here, because they’re not targeting the cloth nappy users, they’re just poaching market share from the other disposable brands. And yes, any donation to UNICEF is better than no donation. But it’s a paltry donation, so my proposal is this: buy Own Brand nappies, and buy your christmas cards from UNICEF!

1. Or one pack, in which case divide the rest of the numbers by two; what do I know about how many disposables you need in a week? [↩]

At the weekend, we bought a doidy cup [or as Pete prefers to call it, a doody or dudey cup; he isn't clear on the spelling].

This is a small plastic cup with insubstantial handles, sloping sides, and a wide rim. It is supposed to be an alternative to the sippy cup sported by small children when they start to drink ribena and their parents don’t want to spend what money they have left after paying for childminders on new carpets.

The packaging, and the breastfeeding support forums, state that this is much better than giving drinks in a traditional feeding bottle or in a sippy cup; it is better for the development of their jaw etc, and for learning normal cup behaviour – i.e. how to put a cup down, albeit a strangely sloping cup which looks a bit odd. I keep trying to put it so that the sides are vertical, and then it falls over. Bernard has the advantage of having no preconceptions about how cups are supposed to work.

This afternoon I offered him the cup with a very small amount of cooled, boiled water in. He was in a flappy mood, so wasn’t prepared to sit primly in his high chair and sip from the rim of the cup. He would prefer to fling it and its contents across the room. So I held the cup, and tipped a little water towards his lips, just as we used to do back in the day when we were cup-feeding expressed breastmilk.

Mostly he turned his head away, while emitting an alarmed grunting, grumbling sound. Then he accidentally got quite a lot of it in his mouth [this was my fault entirely], gagged horribly, and threw up half his last milk feed. I cleaned him up and tried again; he gagged, and threw up the rest of his last milk feed. At this point I called it quits, so that he doesn’t just learn that the Doidy Cup is the thing that makes him gag and throw up.

As he has never had water before, I don’t know whether it was the near-drowning or the taste of the non-milk that caused the gaggage and the vomitage. Nor am I sure how to proceed.

Remind me to write down my thoughts on giving solids, as well; we’re hoping to try that for the first time a week on Friday.

I’ve taken to switching my phone off when Pete gets home. This irks my Baby Buddy Alice, who likes to text me constantly, despite spending most of every weekday with Bernard and myself. I tend to think that if we’ve made an arrangement, then I don’t need her to text me to say she’s on her way, or that she’ll be on her way in a minute, or that she’s running a bit late but she’ll soon be on her way [she will generally send all three of those messages, in reverse order]. But that’s beside the point; it’s the evening calls and texts that irk me right back. In the evenings her text are even more superfluous, since we’ll have been chatting all day and there simply isn’t anything left to talk about until we have another night of babysleep to compare.

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