Changing Towel

Cheapest Place to Change a Child

If either space or money get tight by the time your baby arrives, don’t invest in furniture to create a changing area. You don’t need any fancy surface dedicated to changing dirty diapers. You can dispense with the bulky changing table, which will never stay neat and take up space once they outgrow diapers. You don’t even need a piece of furniture. If you have a few spare feet of floor space or a sleeping surface, you can take care of all your changing business with nary a thing but a simple towel.

Since most people already own several towels, you simply dedicate a couple to changing. I personally like having more than one for this purpose in case something goes wrong and poop escapes. You can toss the soiled  into the rapidly growing pile of infant laundry (even if you don’t use cloth diapers and instead choose disposable) and whip out a clean towel for the next diaper change. As an added bonus, a towel works great for wiping up any other contamination before tossing it in the wash.

My secondborn spent the better part of her first year getting changed on our bed. Her clothes and crib stayed in our room, due to lack of space in the second bedroom with her older sibling. It seemed silly to put all her changing stuff in the other bedroom, and even sillier to move the changing dresser out of his room (at 19 months old, her older brother still wore diapers as well) and into our already crowded bedroom. Living in roughly 1000 square feet, having two dressers for changing also seemed like a ridiculous use of space. Instead, I changed her on our bed most of the time, since her brother was often napping or asleep overnight when she needed a fresh diaper.

I might’ve used the floor, like one friend did, except that my toddler thought anyone lying down on the floor needed to be stepped on. As a result, she did all her tummy time on the bed as well, so each time I changed her diaper, I could flip her over and give her a few minutes of quality tummy exercise as well. One less thing for me to remember in my exhausted state helped tremendously, as did the mobile and compact changing area.