Sweet 'n' Sassy Girls

Cloth Tissues

Posted on 27. Jan, 2011 by Trish in Family Life

I know we’ve all heard of handkerchiefs, but no one really uses them anymore.  There’s a few out there who do, but most people I know just think “ew, gross!”  I did too, up till a couple of nights ago.

My daughter had a bad cold, which she has since passed on to me and her brother, and that included a super runny nose.  Now she is almost 4, and you’d think that she knows how to blow her nose, but that is not the case.  She just does not get that concept.  We tell her to blow and she blows out her mouth.  We’ve tried showing her over and over, and she’ll do it right occasionally, but not on a regular basis.  So instead, she just wipes her nose.  Usually with her hand.  By the end of the night she was waking up crying because her nose hurt so bad.  She had basically rubbed it raw.  She didn’t want regular tissues, so I thought I would go grab my Boogie Wipes so she could use those instead.  They are wet and would be more comfortable, right?

Um, no.

Boogie Wipes are great for stuffy noses, but not raw, runny noses.  They have a saline solution, which is basically like putting salt water on a wound.  She didn’t complain anymore than she would with a regular tissue, but then I tried it, and I was feeling a little raw myself, and WOWZERS!  Did that burn!  At least for a couple of seconds and then it was fine.

Well, I had to do something.  My daughter was in pain, and she had to use something as a tissue, so I ran down to a box of fabric scraps I had to see what would work.  I had lots of soft material, but a lot of it was polyester, like fleece or minky, and that’s not absorbent.  I wanted something cotton that would be super soft.  I found lots of flannels, but they really soft and fuzzy on one side, but not the other.  Finally I found one that was super soft on both sides, and just cut a couple of rectangles out of them.

I ran them upstairs and she used them with no crying and was happy to have soft tissues.

After this happened I started thinking of why I hadn’t thought of it sooner.  I guess in my mind handkerchiefs were always thin white linen like, not nice and soft.

So while I am still using my disposable tissues and I don’t think I could ever fully convert to soft fabric ones, I now know that for the runny noses that need constant wiping that cloth is the way to go!

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