Description: A Changing Bag is a posh term for any large bag that you begin to use to cart around nappies, wipes, creams and all the other associated gubbins. If your partner chooses one it may well be ‘baby themed’ which means light pastel colours, embroidered bears or ducks, with lots of handy external pockets that only seem to be big enough to carry lipsticks and compact mirrors. If you choose the Changing Bag it will be unnecessarily large, probably black and double as a rucksack. Either way you simply can’t function as a parent on the move without one. Get shopping, before she does.
Pros: Assuming that you remember to replace empty packets of wipes, and there’s always at least three nappies in the bag at any one time, your trips out of the house should always remain problem-free.
Cons: The Changing Bag soon becomes a general kit bag and briefcase. Every few months you will decide to sort out the nappy bag and inside you’ll find every ballpoint pen you ever owned, two important letters that needed to be posted a week ago and some form of mushy fruit that’s found its way into the workings of your mobile phone. The bigger the bag, the more useless rubbish you will end up carting around.
What’s it all about? A Changing Bag will become your mobile life over the coming years and therefore it is important to ensure it has enough space for baby’s stuff and for your stuff. If you’re a family that likes to do things at the weekend, ensure it’s big enough for all of your partner’s stuff too because, paradoxically, as the Changing Bag gets bigger her handbag will get proportionally smaller. That’s not a coincidence, nor is it just by chance that you get to carry it all the time. So, I stress again, if you’re the one who will be lumbered with it you should be the one who chooses it.
Bloke’s Rating: The beast-of-burden role will not end when your child is nappy-trained. Oh no. Now you’ve got to exchange the nappy bag for a quite-capable-of-walking-by-herself toddler who wants to ride on daddy’s shoulders.
