The school holidays have gone in a flash as usual and I can really hardly believe that this is the last week of them. This is the week when we always realise that we haven’t got around to doing half of the things that we had planned to do. We still have lots of house maintenance things to do but of course the bad weather has held us back again.
Yesterday we tackled one of the attics. The worst thing about having plenty of storage space in a house is that you tend just to hoard things. The more space you have the more rubbish you accumulate, I find.
But we got right down to the end of the attic and came up with bags of baby clothes and all sorts of stuff that we couldn’t think why we wanted to hold on to. The baby clothes were stored away just in case we decided to have a third child. In the end we decided that we couldn’t face all the sleepless nights and nappy washing again. Yes, I was the last person in the western world still to use terry towelling nappies/diapers, but I hear that they are beginning to be used again.
The old nappies were sent off to Rumania years ago.
So we’ve been busy being astonished by how tiny the clothes are and sorting stuff out for recycling and taking to charity shops. There are still some books which I was sure were in there but they haven’t surfaced, which is annoying.
The other attic has a cot, pram and high chair in it. Time has gone so quickly that I’m tempted to hold on to them just in case we ever do have grandchildren at some point in the future.
So one attic is almost empty now, it only has an ancient BBC computer in it, and that is the way that it is going to stay. Don’t ask me why they want to hold on to the computer. I would chuck it out but all the blokes in my family said NO!
Cloth diapers are huge now (at least in urban Canada), as they’re considered so much more eco-friendly. Everyone gets them cleaned by a diaper-cleaning service though. I don’t think such services existed even ten years ago–we’re a spoilt lot!
I had heard that some people were going back to using cloth nappies for ecological reasons but I don’t think many people use them in Britain. That was one of the reasons why I used them. They were also much cheaper and we probably couldn’t have afforded disposables. I used disposables when we went on holiday and I hated them. They weren’t very good and I wasn’t happy about wiping s**t from baby toes all the time, and it was the only time my boys got nappy rash. At that time I had a twin-tub washing machine too. Just think – every disposable ever used is still mouldering in a land fill dump somewhere!