All families have traditions that are passed down through the ranks- but when is it time to let go of tradition and forge your own path? Liz Fraser explains...
As a child, I was regularly dragged off on hideously long car journeys to Scotland, to visit family. My dad drove; my mum packed everything. In a cardboard box beneath her feet she’d have enough food to keep four people going for the ten-hour motorway-a-thon, a flask of stinky tea, a book, a manicure set….and, in a small sandwich bag, a cloth. This cloth probably contained more bacteria and grime than your average urinal, but it has its uses: when said tea was spilled, she’d be ready to wipe it up. When I got marmite all over my face, there was the cloth again.
When I grew up - a little - and produced children of my own to cram into a car, I did what many of us do: I copied what my mum had done before me. (Well, except for the manicure set. And the stinky tea.) The last thing I’d do before we left the house was wet a facecloth with warm water (forgetting that bacteria like it even more if it’s warm) and stick it in an airless bag. And off we’d go. Five hours later, somewhere near the Lake District, out would come this musty, damp rag to wipe a face, de-yoghurt a booster seat or un-goo a book. Or usually all three.
While all this might seem sensible and eco-friendly and all the rest, it was, in hindsight a little bit bonkers. I mean, if you’re trying to make something clean, why wipe it with something so filthy that a health inspector would nuke it immediately? And also, when you’re travelling with kids, why make life harder by carrying around little bags containing damp facecloths?? Why not, just for example, take some…..baby wipes?!
The multi-use world of baby wipes was opened up to me by a lady sitting behind me during a wedding service. My baby daughter, fresh from a pre-service feed, had just puked on the pew, and I was a bit stumped a to what to do. Should I wipe it with the hymn sheet? With my husband’s handkerchief, last washed in 1995? With my sleeve?
And what kind of a mother was I anyway, who had nothing to wipe baby puke off a church pew, for goodness sake? Answer: a mother who hadn’t yet learned about baby wipes.
I am grateful to the baby-wipe lady, because she made me realise that I was being a total dufus for blindly copying everything my Mum did, and also because my life with little kids got immeasurably easier – and cleaner – from that moment on. Where previously I’d scoffed at baby wipes, believing them to be wasteful and only used by mothers who’d turn up to a picnic with a potty, small containers filled with pureed butternut squash and a Baby Einstein DVD - you know, just in case - now I came to realise that they are an absolutely essential item in every sane parent’s bag, house, office, car, pram and bathroom.
Posset? Baby wipe. Stain on sofa? Baby wipe. Milk on expensive handbag? Panic, then baby wipe. Orange juice on dashboard? Several baby wipes. The list of uses for these tiny, damp, hygienic, disposable little wonders is longer than that of George Clooney’s wives-in-waiting. (I’m still waiting…I guess he must be very shy or something.)
Where once upon a time baby wipes used to smell like a spill from a chemical factory and be used only to wipe things off babies’ bottoms that smelled like a spill from a sewage factory, these days they have evolved into something altogether more user-friendly and useful. Because they contain no harsh chemicals I use them to wipe everything from mouths to hands and even delicate fabrics and the leather sofa when required, and they leave no residue. If you can also carry them about in those handy moisture-retaining sealable containers they often come in, rather than having them dry out into slightly aromatic but useless scraps of tissue at the bottom of your handbag, like I do, then so much the better.
Whatever you do with your baby wipes, when your children are very young, use them. When you see a 3-for-2, stock up. Plant them in every corner of the house and then sit back, wait for the spills, and know you have it covered – quickly, neatly and hygienically. Sorted.
