Sometimes when you’re a mom you have to get ingenious. Before Nick was even born I found that having puppy training pads in the house could be very useful if you have a baby. There not your typical baby product, but I found them to be very helpful.
I had received a beautiful cradle to use for Nick (sadly he hated sleeping in it, but that’s another story). It was older and it had a thin mattress with a plastic cover, but (even though it hadn’t been used before) the plastic was starting to rip and wear away. I didn’t feel that we needed to worry about getting a new mattress, but I wanted to find a way to protect it from the millions of ways that a newborn could get it wet and icky. Try as I might I couldn’t find a cradle mattress protector. Then I read somewhere about how someone had used puppy training pads to protect the mattress in their Pack ‘N Play. That seemed like such a great idea, and it wouldn’t cost much.
The next time I went grocery shopping I picked up a package of the puppy pads. It took two pads to make sure that all areas of the mattress were covered. It wasn’t difficult to cover the pad and put the fitted sheet over them. The sheet was wonderful because it held the pads perfectly in place so they wouldn’t get all bunched up. With that the mattress was perfectly protected.
Of course you can’t buy just one or two puppy pads at a time. Oh no, you have to buy a whole package. Now it didn’t cost a ton, but I hate waste, so I didn’t like not being able to use the others. Then I had the brilliant idea to put them on Nick’s changing pad. You may remember that I hadn’t received a changing pad before Nick was born and I rushed to Babies “R” Us while I was in the early stages of labor to buy one. This meant that when we brought Nick home from the hospital there was a place to change him, but we never got around to getting a cover for it. Honestly at this point I am totally OK with that because it would have been ruined by all of the nasty diaper changing messes anyways. This is where the puppy pads came in. We would lay a puppy pad on the changing pad and whenever it got messy we would throw it out and lay a new one down. It worked so well! Now I will say that this technique isn’t very “green,” so for those of you that like to cloth diaper this probably isn’t for you.
Puppy pads truly made caring for a newborn so much easier for me. Diaper changing messes stressed me out, so needing to do nothing more than throw one pad away and putting a new one out was wonderful. They also could be thrown into a diaper bag to be used as a changing pad when you’re out and about. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t like to lay Nick down on most restroom changing tables. They just seem so dirty, so I always put something under him.
Puppy pads were not a product that I ever thought I’d buy, let alone use for my child, but we found them to be extremely helpful. Sadly I wasn’t able to use up the last package I bought and I have know idea what to do with the extra pads, but maybe we’ll have a use for them again someday.
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I use toddler size 100% cotton Indian prefolds which you can buy for $24 a dozen. Of course, they’re washable / reusable so way more cost effective and environmentally friendly. I have used them for everything from changing pads, protecting the mattress from leaks (especially from me in the early days of BFing), protecting the bjorn bouncer and car seat, providing a soft spot to lay baby after baths, and preventing sliding in the shower / bath seat.
For bassinet and mattress protection you can get 100% wool protectors – they’re inherently antibacterial and require infrequent care.
Those sound really useful. I like being green, but I must say I’m no good at it when it comes to dirty diapers
. With the messes Nick made when he was young I was grateful to just throw it away. I never could have handled cloth diapering.
I don’t know about the pads you bought but most puppy training pads are treated with a chemical whose scent is meant to attract puppies and replicate the scent of urine so the dog will use them. Thought people should know before letting their little ones skin come in contact with them.
Thank you for the information Steve. You’re right some of the puppy pads do contain the scent, but not all of them do. It is important for people to know though so that they don’t buy the scented products.
I wanted to make sure we weren’t the only parents in the world using puppy pads as changing table pads, and thankfully your entry came up in a google search. Did you ever find that our baby had skin irritation from contact with the pads? We had some spare ones lying around, and rather than spend money on “changing pads,” we opted to just burn through the puppy pads that we never used or never would use for a long time. So far they have been a godsend. Our baby is now all of 4 days old, and she has already had surprise changing table shits that would have made much bigger messes were it not for the pad underneath. Even just 20 minutes ago, we woke her up for her nighttime diaper change and feeding, and just as I had laid down a clean diaper, she shot beyond that and onto the farthest edge of the pad, but no mess on the pad!! I just laughed. I already dealt with her pooping in my arms in her hooded towel, and mistakenly setting her on our bed only to have poop bleed through and make even more of a messes. Anyway, sorry for the essay, I just wondered if you could answer that early question, and I wanted to say thanks for having the blog and reassuring me that we aren’t the only ones using puppy pads.
Also, forgive the spelling and grammar mistakes, I am typing this on an iPhone keyboard at 2 am.
I’m glad I could make your feel better Erik. Those early diaper changes can be such a mess. I can’t imagine how many times I would have had to scrub and clean a changing pad cover. Like I didn’t always have enough spit up messes to clean! I never noticed any skin irritation from the pad. Now I will say Nick has bad eczema, so I possibly could have missed a separate irritation, but the skin that would have touched the pad really wasn’t the area where he had eczema, so I’d say it never caused any problems.