It's Hard To Be Green at 3am

We've fallen off the eco-wagon with a bump. The lure of a convenient, throwaway, disposable lifestyle is pretty irresistible when the baby catalogues are full of environmentally unfriendly products that give you a few more minutes to yourself in the day and a few more hours of kip at night.
For the first weeks of his life, Oscar wore cute little cloth nappies. At first we were feeling very pleased with ourselves - the nappies looked very comfortable, were easy to wash and dry, didn't leak and didn't end up in a huge pile in a landfill site - what more could a new parent want? But as Oscar started to take in more liquid, the nappies (that I'd bought second hand) gave up the ghost (probably due to the fact that they hadn't been looked after properly by the previous owner) and started leaking within a few minutes of us changing them. Now I like to think of myself as an environmentally conscious parent, but when it's the middle of the night and you've spent two hours trying to get your offspring to visit the land of nod, the last thing you want to deal with is numerous nappy changes when you could ensconce your baby in a super-absorbent (albeit hideously chemical-packed) disposable nappy. So we switched from cloth to 'eco-friendlier' disposables which contain a much larger percentage of biodegradable materials than standard nappies. This temporarily salved our consciences, until I attended the West London 'Real Nappy Night' last week, where I discovered that sadly these still play havoc in landfill sites due to the large amount of organic matter contained within. So we're taking a big deep breath and jumping back on the wagon by ordering some nice new cloth ones. Oscar is growing at a rate of knots, and we've broken into 3-6 month old size clothes, which he will be filling even more efficiently soon as cloth nappies tend to be a lot bulkier than disposables. However we're counting our blessings: when he's learning to walk he will have something nice and soft on his behind to land on when he falls over... and we won't be adding to the EIGHT MILLION nappies that end up in landfill each and every day in the UK. A sobering thought - if an 80-year-old man digs up the nappies he wore as a baby, the chances are they will still be in pretty good nick. Enough said.