Celebrating One Year of Slinging
This month marks a whole year since we started the Tameside NCT Sling Library back in 2015. The library was started by myself, Caroline, with the help of the rest of the Tameside committee, when found a love of babywearing when my daughter was just 4 weeks old. She's always been a 'good' baby, if there is such a thing, but still it was a struggle to function 'normally', again, if there is such a thing. Simple tasks such as cleaning and tidying became so much harder when a tiny human to look after.
Up until this point I'd been fairly anti-babywearing, thinking things like: "Surely that can't be safe?" and "Hmm well they might want to do that but no thank you, not for me". So when my daughter was 4 weeks old we went to our first NCT session at IKEA, mostly just to get out of the house and feel like a normal human being for a little white. It was there that my eyes were opened to the real world of babywearing; that I realised that it wasn't just something for the slightly strange hippy type but that it had a benefit for everyone; that I first wore my daughter in a Close Caboo and felt a closeness that I hadn't quite ever felt before.
Fast forward 5 months and I'd become more involved with the NCT and we began to consider whether maybe it was time to set up a sling library. Through the help of Aquanauts, who were our sponsors for 2015-16, we were able to get the sling library off the ground. We started with just 8 slings and me, in IKEA every Tuesday. Quickly interest grew, more than we could quite keep up with.
It has been an amazing year where we have been able to support over 40 different parents and babies through hires of the slings. Moving forward into 2017, we know that this number will be even greater. We now have 14 different slings, although we are working to get more and three new volunteers, including Leah who you will see leading the library at IKEA on a Tuesday. We couldn't have done this all without the support of Aquanauts so want to send a massive thank you out to them for all their support over this past year.
Tameside NCT Sling Library
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