Review: Baby Beehinds hemp nappy

Rachel writes…

TGF would like to welcome Rachel to the family.  Rachel is a contributor over on Bambino Goodies and has turned reviewer for TGF today.

Made from super-absorbent hemp (rather than the usual cotton), the Baby Beehinds hemp nappy is a birth to potty nappy whose unique selling point is a natty system of poppers to adjust the size and absorbency. Hemp is also a good pick for the eco-friendly parent, since it needs less water and chemicals to grow.

As for me, I’m a relatively recent cloth nappy convert, using re-usables regularly on my five month old, but still sticking to disposables at night, or when we’re staying away from home.

Hold your horses
Once you have your nappy (or nappies) then you can’t just jump straight in and try them out. Or, rather, you could, but you’re instructed to wash it three times before use to ensure it’s absorbent enough. The instructions further add that the nappy only reaches its full absorbency after an eye-watering ten washes! Since it’s slow-drying and I wanted to get this review written sometime before 2009, I went with the three washes before cracking on and getting it in use.

Appearance
It’s a cute nappy. Obviously, hand on heart, the committed greenie shouldn’t really judge re-usable nappies based on cuteness alone (… honestly, perhaps they shouldn’t be judged on cuteness at all). But I reckon I spend so much of my time looking at nappies, that looking at something appealing has got to be a bonus. Made from cream coloured hemp that once washed looks and feels rather like felt, it has a little gathering around the legs, a little bee on the front, and a small label with a smiling bee head on the back. It was all looking good…sadly, things didn’t look so good once I tried to use it.

Snap out of it
I’m no stranger to layering up paper liners, fleece liners, wraps, dealing with Velcro / Aplix and the like. But even I struggled somewhat with the instructions for this one. And you do need to have some kind of guidance – the whole nappy appears at first glance to be covered in poppers!

Perhaps I exaggerate somewhat… but what with the adjustable bits, the snap in ‘tongue’, and the snap in booster, there are many more poppers and snappy bits than I’m used to. What I really wanted were some nice clear, big pictures showing me how to snap it together. Try as I might I couldn’t find such a thing online, and instead found myself grappling with some rather opaque written instructions. I remain convinced that the design, and the strategic placement of all the poppers, is probably all incredibly clever. The idea is that you can customise the absorbency, folding the insert differently for a boy or a girl, and hey presto –  you have one nappy which you can use right from newborn to a heavy-wetting toddler. It all sounds genius. But, sadly addled-Mummy-brained thing that I am at the moment, without clear pictures that I can gawp at, I ended up having to make an educated guess, and am only reasonably confident that I was actually using it correctly in the end.

In use
Once the insert was in, and I’d poppered it (I hoped) the right way around my five month old, I couldn’t get my normal wrap around it. (For those not already using cloth nappies, this kind require a wrap over the top of them.) It’s a big old nappy, and my wraps left bits sticking out at the top – a big no no as this would mean wet clothes / wet bed / wet everything. Luckily, I had a Motherease wrap kicking about, and a bit of squeezing meant I could just try it out.

Sadly I wasn’t that impressed. The nappy was so huge that I’m having difficulty imagining it being used on a newborn. Then when I picked up the little one it felt bizarrely heavy and solid on her. I’m as big a fan of the big-bottomed cloth-nappied baby as the next woman, but this extra solidity in the nappy region was a bit off-putting.

Try as I might, I couldn’t secure it so that it didn’t gape slightly at the legs. And then at the first poo, it leaked straight onto the wrap, which was our first wrap leakage ever, and a bit disappointing.

However
I’ll be honest, it’s not the nappy for me. But I feel a bit mean writing such a damning review, because it’s my personal opinion that the whole point of cloth nappies is that there is such a huge range. Size, fitting, absorbancy, appearance, material, shape… what’s right for one mother, and what fits one baby, will not be completely right for someone else who wants something a bit different.

It’s only fair to say that people rave about these online, particularly praising the ingeniousness of the snap-in insert (I knew I wasn’t getting it right), the fact that it’s a birth to potty nappy, therefore saving you some cash as well as saving the planet, the fact that hemp is good for sensitive skin, and the apparently totally incredible absorbency compared to other brands. I don’t have a heavy wetter, and perhaps if I did, my view would be rather different.

Overall
I’ll be sticking to my normal brand, but – who knows? – you might just fall in love.

Where to buy
You can get hold of your own Baby Beehinds hemp nappy from Ethical Superstore for £11.95 Delivery costs vary between nothing at all on orders over £40, to £5.95 for express delivery, which is guaranteed the next day.

Verdict
2 out of 5