They're not Terry's, they're ours, unfortunately.

7 years ago today I watched the woman of my dreams walk up the aisle towards me as I waited to become a married man, and whilst this blog isn’t about me and her I feel like it is appropriate to take a little time to think about 7 wonderful years.

Enough time?  Good, now back to the calamities. 

We use cloth, reusable nappies, the majority of which are shaped.  Just like this.

I'll never look this clean ever again

 However, we also have some square terry nappies, which are just like this. 

Doesn't look like it could make a grown man cry does it?

These need to be folded to fit.  Now I was never very good at Origami.  Never mind a swan, I could barely get the classic ‘Sheet of Paper Folded in Half’ right without something going wrong.  And folding a terry nappy it turns out is rather closer to the swan than the half paper.  As these diagrams demonstrate. 

This one's a really good flier

Pull my tail and my head bobs up and down

This was first made clear to us when we were on holiday for a week with my parents and some friends whilst my wife was pregnant.  The subject of reusable terry nappies came up at a mealtime and was followed by the reconstruction of a terry nappy folding session which involved the table cloth, most of the napkins, a couple of forks and a passing waiter.  Really, by the end we could have been putting on some sort of surreal Harold Pinter play, or  provided enough nappies to keep a daycare centre going for a month.  What was most concerning however was that it took about four very capable and experienced people most of lunch before they had arrived at the ideal fold, and I, for one, was certainly neither experienced or capable.

Thus when we came to our own first Terry nappy fold I was not expecting it to be easy, but my wife was with me and we had the benefit of a diagram, so what could go wrong?  Well, it seems that newborn babies are not very big, and there are quite a few weeks where you can only describe them as miniscule.  This should have provided us with some sort of guide as to roughly how big we ought to make the nappy.  You’d think wouldn’t you.  Unfortunately we were so engrossed in following the instructions on the diagram that we didn’t realise that far from using the nappy we had lovingly created as we had intended, what we had actually done was make our baby a full length cloak that little red riding hood would have been jealous of.  It was massive, she was not; we had made it as though we  intended to fill our bath with all the water from the Atlantic Ocean.  No matter how hard you try one will not fit in the other.  To our credit we noticed the discrepancy almost immediately, although not without first trying to stuff her into it, just in case it would magically shrink when wrapped around her, a bit like the TARDIS in reverse.

It wasn’t, and didn’t.  So we were left with a nappyless baby, who had no idea why her parents were finding all of this quite so funny, and was a bit too young to join in with all the laughter, but seemed to be enjoying herself nonetheless, and two parents, neither of whom, it was becoming clear, could make this nappy small enough to fit. 

My wife, finally, managed to fold and fit the nappy perfectly and the whole farce was over with.  I have still never managed to fold one without the direct supervision of my wife.  I’m just glad there was nothing about nappies in the wedding vows.