The Beard and I stumbled on the BabyDam out of necessity more than anything else but now I don’t think we would stop using it even if we didn’t have to!
A few months back we went through quite a bad patch with Baby J in terms of sleep. He was never a big sleeper, even in the beginning when everyone tells you to enjoy those times when your baby just sleeps (hated those people), but when he was about 6 months old he got sick and his sleeping habits really took a turn for the worse. I mean, waking every hour during the night. Every. Hour. At the time I was a SAHM so I was dealing with the brunt of this but when it went on for 6 weeks or so it took a toll on the Beard and our marriage in general – which was when I knew it needed to be sorted out.
Turns out a key step to sorting out his bad sleeping habits (when he was better, obviously) was to be a lot stricter with our naptime and bedtime routine. We already had a loose routine for bedtime but had never thought of using one for naptimes or of being so strict with it. It restricted us a little when it came to going out and having a life, basically, but the change it made in Baby J more than made it worth it.
To get back to the point of the story, one of the steps in our bedtime routine (not naptime) is bathtime. Coincidentally we introduced these daily baths at the same time as pretty severe water restrictions were put into place in Cape Town; even filling a bath a little bit for a baby uses a huge amount of water but I didn’t want to bath him in a bucket and he was too big for the sink so we needed a plan.
Then I found the BabyDam.
It’s basically a bath divider – a very simple but very smart piece of plastic. You just bend it to fit in your bath and stick it down (with water) and you can happily run a bath for your little one which is only half or a third of the size you would usually have.
To be honest, you do need to stick it down quite well and quite a few times we’ve had water trickling through to the other side because someone wasn’t careful enough putting it in the bath (after cleaning or whatever), but if you do it properly the other side is really totally dry.
So now Baby J can still have a bath every day (I’m still on alternate shower days *sigh*) without us feeling guilty or paying through our noses for our water.
You can buy this magical piece of plastic from the Babydam online shop for R395 (pink) or R495 (grey or green).
* This is NOT a sponsored post.
[…] We went with some friends for the pizza special (so we didn’t get the kiddies special because you can only make use of one special at a time) so the adults shared four pizzas and the two kidlets shared a kiddies margherita pizza. Now you can judge me all you want for feeding my 14-month old pizza but this was his first time and it was an absolute hit. We were in and out in a couple hours, which was just enough time to avoid a meltdown and be home for bathtime. […]