Today our little girl, Autumn, has her first birthday. What follows is the story I wrote up for gDiapers documenting the night of her birth and the involvement of someone very special to us.
G is for good friends, for giving your time and for going the extra mile…
It’s 11:30 at night and, although I’m still calm and not in any real discomfort, I can tell that the twinges are coming a bit more regularly. I’m pretty sure that this is it, and that our third child is getting ready to make an appearance. So I decide to make the call, not to our midwife, who will be the second person I reach out to, but to Kim Graham-Nye.
Hang on, let me recap as you probably need some backstory to know why I’m phoning the co-founder of gDiapers in the middle of the night.
I’m Jess. You may or may not have heard of me and my husband James who have been sailing round the world for over 8 years now. We first got connected with gDiapers back in 2013 when we were expecting our first child while moored up in Mexico. That was the start of both our parenting and cloth-diapering journey and Kim and Jason have been in contact with us through it all.
Using cloth nappies on board a sailboat with a finite water supply may seem like a challenge but, for us, it was really the only sensible option. How could you possibly sail to remote islands or undertake long ocean passages using non-biodegradable disposable diapers? You’d amass far too much trash en route and we’re often in tiny, out of the way places with no roads or shops, let alone rubbish facilities. Amazingly, with both cloth and bio-degradable inserts to choose from, gDiapers have worked exceptionally well in our floating lifestyle.
So much so that we confidently left Mexico when our little girl, Rocket, was just 8 months old and cruised the South Pacific with her. In fact it all worked so well that we decided to have another baby after we got married in Fiji. Our baby boy, Indigo, joined the crew list in New Zealand and was also in gDiapers from day one. We sailed onwards from there, through the island groups of Vanuatu, the Solomon islands and even spent a few months in the outer atolls of Papua New Guinea. All with our little crew toddling round in his brightly coloured gpants.
We arrived into Indonesia in late 2017 and had a big wake up call. We’d gone from pristine beaches and unspoilt sand to seeing firsthand the damaged caused by our culture of endless consumption. The Indonesian islands have some of the greatest cruising and diving grounds in the world and yet so much of this country is marred by plastic waste. Fortunately we make a point of beach-clearing and talking to people about what can be done to combat this problem. Again we reached out to Kim and Jason and were able to introduce them to some friends we made in Indonesia who are very active within their local communities. With any luck there will be a way of introducing gDiapers products to this country who’s natural beauty is really being masked by how we humans are treating it.
But, I’ve strayed off my story again. Whilst in Indonesia we also decided to have a third baby and I was pregnant for most of our time there. We had already planned a trip back to our native UK and realised that this would be when this third anchor baby would arrive, during our visit back when we would also be renovating our rental house.
Being on dry land for a spell means that we are lucky enough to have friends to stay and it just so happened that both Kim and Jason were passing through London at times, working on their gCycle project with its UK trials. Kim was our houseguest on a few occasions and saw my bump growing bigger and bigger as we all played “guess when the baby will come”. Rocket had surprised us all by arriving at 37 weeks whilst Indigo had got comfortable and didn’t make an appearance until 42 weeks. So we were playing the waiting game, with our builders poised to come in and start demolition as soon as our hoped for home birth had taken place.
So, at 11:30, I call Kim and she comes racing over from the far side of London to offer her support and help if needed. Our two kids adore her and, if the homebirth didn’t go according to plan and we needed to transfer to hospital, she was willing to stay and look after them. The midwife arrived and Kim tries to get some sleep while I labour in the next door bathroom and bedroom. At 04:28am our baby girl Autumn is born, calmly and naturally at home. We’re tired but elated, basking in the incredible glow of new life and tiny limbs and delicate features. Kim is woken by a little newborn cry and gets to hold our little baby, even putting her first nappy on!
I suppose that really I wanted to share this story with you, all you gmums and gdads, gfamilies out there, to show just how much of a community this really is. Our family is always going to be linked with Jason and Kim, strangely it’s a bond made through salt-water and nappies! And, whilst I can’t guarantee that Kim or Jason will be on hand to attend at any of your births, I can tell you this much – I’m so very grateful that choosing to cloth-diaper resulted in us gaining such wonderful friends.
Now, one year old, walking babbling and delighting us all with her wicked grin, this little minx is going to be getting to grips with being a boat baby. Happy birthday Au-tum-tum x
