Disposable Diaper-Changing Sheets

Before Baby R was born, a fellow dog-owning friend confessed that she used puppy toilet-training sheets when changing her son's diaper. Having no desire to wash the diaper-changing pad cover every time there was leakage (or squirtage, as the case sometimes is with a baby), I thought it was a pretty good idea. One concern I had, though, was that it could add up to a lot of money. My dog's pee pads are not cheap, but because I live in an apartment and mostly because I'm a lazy bum and don't want to trudge all the way downstairs and outside late at night for that last potty break before bedtime (oh, stop sneering, all you home-with-a-yard owners), I'm willing to fork over the dough and withstand censorious looks from the petshop cashier person, who informs me they have a great toilet-training class for dogs.

A second concern was that I didn't really want my baby's skin coming in contact with questionable chemicals, which those pet sheets are often treated with to encourage a puppy to pee.

After touring a few incontinence Web sites, further Googling led me to Mednet Direct. At $34.95 for 300 sheets, this was definitely the cheapest deal I could find. And everything about the site was totally suspicious--just check it out and you'll see what I mean. In addition, at the time, all I could find online were endless press releases about Mednet and its great deal on puppy sheets, but nary a legitimate human review.

Being the wild risk-taker that I am, I decided "what the heck" and ordered a box. For the record, they have a pretty expensive flat-rate shipping charge of $12.95, but the total price was still lower than anything else I could find. A week later, much to my surprise, the pads arrived, and in a fairly compact box, to boot (a bonus, as I'd been worrying about where to keep 300 bloody pee-pee sheets, but the whole lot fit quite neatly in the little cabinet under the bathroom sink).

First things first, the quality of these sheets is not great, especially for dogs. My pup is a little guy, but when he uses one of these sheets, the pee rapidly seeps past the border--and just keeps on going. On the other hand, it's more than adequate if you're using it for changing diapers. Unless there's an accident, your baby isn't going to pee on this thing. It's just to catch a smear here and there, and save you from doing extra laundry. In our house, one sheet lasts us a long time, unless Baby Girl has a particularly explosive blowout.

So that's the verdict: The Mednet sheets are cheap, both in price and quality, but for changing diapers, you don't need to waste your money on something better. They're also great for diaper changing outside of the house, whether you're protecting your baby from having to come in contact with those changing tables in public restrooms or doing an emergency change on the floor...somewhere.