I’ve shared before about mama cloth – what it is, how I use it, my thoughts, etc. I didn’t start using cloth pads until after Hudson was born but I knew I wanted to use them in my postpartum recovery with Parker. While I was pregnant I started building my stash of BIIIIIIG pads to use postpartum.
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All of the cloth pads I have for postpartum are 12″ or 13″ pads. When I got them I laughed out loud at how HUGE they were! However once I actually used them I loved the size – nice and comfy and great for the heavy bleeding after having a baby. No worries about leaks.
I didn’t start using my mama cloth until six days postpartum. I had some large maxi pads and Depends that I wanted to use up so I used those for the first few days. However, once I switched I wished I had started using my cloth pads earlier! They are so much more comfortable!
I had 11 postpartum sized pads – five 13″ pads and 6 12″ pads. That was enough for me to wash every other day. By the time I started using them (day 6) my bleeding had already slowed down a lot. If I’d used them from the beginning I would have probably needed to wash every day. Once I was past the initial crazy amount of bleeding, 11 was plenty. I will definitely add a few more to my stash for next time (no, that’s not an announcement!) so that I don’t have to wash quite as often though.
I mentioned before that I’d heard that using reusable menstrual products can result in your period (or postpartum bleeding) being lighter and less painful. I still don’t know if that’s true or not but I will say that I only bled for two, maybe three weeks. When I went back for my six week check up my doctor was very surprised to hear that I’d bled for such a short time. I guess maybe that isn’t the norm? I don’t remember how long I bled with Hudson (when I didn’t use mama cloth) to compare but I thought it was interesting and worth noting.
Because the pads were so much bigger than my regular pads I bought a larger wet bag to store them in. My favorite wet bags are these Bummis brand ones so I got a medium and it was the perfect size!
I was a little nervous about using mama cloth after giving birth because I wasn’t sure if it could stand up to the mess that is postpartum bleeding. However it was great and I will most definitely do it again! For now my pads have been packed up but once my period returns the postpartum pads will be great to use as overnight pads as well.
Did you use cloth pads in your postpartum recovery? Would you try it for next time?
Great post! I loved my cloth pads postpartum. After my first child was born, my midwife fixed me up with a hospital washcloth folded into those weird disposable pants and told me that I could simply drop the washcloth in the Soiled Linens bin. Once the bleeding slowed down the second day, I switched to my cloth pads and used them for the rest of postpartum which was about 3 weeks. The only problem I had was when the flow got lighter and more intermittent, it would dry completely and kind of bond with the fabric so that I got some stains that were hard to remove.
My second child’s jaundice treatment was done in a two-day inpatient stay at Children’s Hospital after we had been home from the birth center. When the hospital called with her blood test result and told me to bring her in, for some reason I didn’t realize she and therefore I, as her food source, would be staying overnight, so after she was admitted I called my partner and asked him to pack me a bag. It was just easier to tell him to throw in the pack of disposable pads than to explain where to find my cloth pads. But by the time I got home, I was noticing a funny smell that made me worry my stitches might be getting infected. I switched back to cloth, and everything was fine! This time I had bleeding for more than SEVEN weeks, although it was very light most of the time after the second week, so when it got lighter I first used the cloth pads I didn’t really like (I’ve tried a lot of brands) and threw away the ones that got stubborn stains, and then I used disposable panty liners which I find less annoying than disposable pads. We never figured out why the bleeding took so long to stop.
Seven weeks!! Wow!