Why Dijon’s Baby Album Saved My Sanity (And Vinyl Almost Didn't)

It was 3:14 am on a Tuesday, and it was raining that very specific, miserable type of London rain that seems to fall horizontally. Twin A was screaming because her socks were on, and Twin B was screaming because Twin A was screaming. The air in our tiny flat smelled overwhelmingly of stale milk, wet wipes, and the sticky cherry residue of Calpol. I was sitting on the floor, deeply sleep-deprived, covered in an ungodly amount of someone else's drool, wondering if my former colleagues in the newsroom were currently sleeping soundly or perhaps enjoying a cocktail in a bar with ambient lighting.

In a desperate bid to drown out the dual-channel wailing without resorting to the terrifyingly upbeat horrors of generic nursery rhymes, I leaned over and dropped the needle on my turntable. I put on Dijon's sophomore album, Baby. If you haven't heard it, it's this incredibly raw, chaotic, beautiful R&B record that perfectly encapsulates the absolute mania of domesticity and new fatherhood. It was exactly what I needed in that moment—a reminder that someone else out there had experienced this specific brand of isolation and lived to write a critically acclaimed album about it.

But as I sat there on the floor, watching the record spin, a truly devastating realization washed over me. I looked down at the brightly coloured, wipe-clean playmat the twins were currently rolling around on. I'd bought it cheap off the internet because it looked easy to clean. It was made of vinyl. The record spinning on my shelf? Also vinyl. I was using the dijon baby vinyl to save my mental health, while simultaneously letting my children gnaw on a massive sheet of industrial PVC.

The soundtrack to domestic panic

Listening to music about parenting while actively failing at parenting is a very specific type of out-of-body experience. Dijon recorded his album in relative isolation with his wife and infant son, and you can absolutely hear the claustrophobia and the overwhelming love fighting for dominance in the tracks. It's messy. The vocals crack, the instruments bleed into each other, and it doesn't try to package the newborn phase into some pristine, glowing Instagram reel. It just sounds like what 4 am feels like.

Our GP had casually mentioned at our six-week check that maternal mental health (and paternal, though we get talked about much less) is often anchored by finding small pieces of your old identity and dragging them into your new reality. For me, that meant physical media. I couldn't go to gigs anymore, but I could still carefully take a record out of its sleeve. Just having that tactile experience, that brief moment of ritual before the chaos resumed, was enough to stop me from completely losing my mind when the twins decided nap time was a suggestion rather than a rule.

But music on vinyl is one thing. Products made of vinyl for babies are a completely different, infinitely more stressful conversation that I was absolutely not prepared to have at three in the morning.

What the health visitor actually said about plastic

A few weeks prior to my 3 am existential crisis, our lovely NHS health visitor had sat on our threadbare sofa, sipped her lukewarm tea, and casually destroyed my peace of mind. She noticed one of the twins chewing enthusiastically on a plastic changing pad and muttered something about endocrine disruptors. I nodded as if I had any idea what she was talking about, mentally filing it away in the terrifyingly large drawer labeled 'Things That Might Hurt My Children.'

From what I vaguely understand—and my biology GCSE is a very distant, foggy memory—vinyl, when used in baby products, usually means Polyvinyl Chloride, or PVC. To make PVC soft enough to become a squishy playmat or a flexible bib, manufacturers pump it full of chemical plasticizers called phthalates. The health visitor essentially told me that these chemicals can mess with a baby's developing hormones, which is precisely the kind of vague, terrifying medical information that sends a tired parent straight down a late-night internet rabbit hole. She didn't give me a clean, definitive list of what to buy, just a general warning that left me questioning every single object in our home.

The absolute cheek of recycling codes

This brings me to my major grievance with the modern baby industry. You're telling me I've to flip over every single waterproof bib, changing mat, and bath toy, squint in the dim light of the nursery, and look for a tiny, embossed triangle with a number '3' in it? Because apparently, that '3' is the universal symbol for PVC. It feels like an incredibly cruel joke to play on people who haven't had a full night's sleep since 2022. We're expected to be material scientists on top of being chefs, chauffeurs, and emotional regulation coaches for tiny tyrants.

It's the greenwashing that really gets under my skin. You'll see a playmat advertised with pictures of laughing babies in a sunlit Scandinavian nursery, boasting about being "easy-wipe" and "waterproof." They don't mention that the waterproofing is achieved through a cocktail of toxic plastics. You basically have to become a paranoid detective, assuming everything is made of poison unless it specifically screams "PVC-free" or "TPU" on the label. I spent three hours one night just throwing away cheap plastic toys we'd been gifted, filling a bin bag with enough phthalates to take down a small horse.

And frankly, trying to replace it all is exhausting when you're on a budget, though I'm definitely not buying glass baby bottles either because dropping one at 4 am on a tile floor is a mistake you only make exactly once.

If you're currently panic-scrolling while pinned under a sleeping infant, maybe save yourself the chemical headache and just browse our organic cotton collection instead of trying to decipher microscopic triangles on the bottom of bath toys.

Replacing the toxic rubbish

Once I realized the cheap vinyl mat had to go, I started looking for actual natural fibers. The problem with twins is that whatever you buy, you need two of them, or they'll literally fight to the death over it. We had been struggling massively with Twin B's skin anyway—she looked like she'd been dragged through a patch of stinging nettles every time we put her in high-street synthetic blends.

We eventually swapped out all the synthetic onesies for the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit, and I honestly can't overstate the difference it made. I'm usually highly skeptical of premium baby clothes because they just get covered in mashed banana and bodily fluids within twelve seconds of wearing them. But the organic cotton actually let her skin breathe. It didn't have those terrible, scratchy synthetic dyes, and the eczema patches on her stomach cleared up within a week. Plus, it has just enough stretch that I can wrestle it over her head while she's actively trying to barrel-roll off the changing table, which is a structural feature I deeply appreciate.

We also tried some other highly-rated gear to replace the toxic plastic we'd binned. Someone gifted us the Wooden Baby Gym. Look, it's objectively lovely, beautifully crafted from sustainable wood, and looks fantastic in the living room. But honestly? Twin A just stared at the wooden elephant like it owed her twenty quid, and Twin B spent most of her time trying to pull the entire structure down on top of herself. It's a great product if you've a chill baby, but my children are apparently adrenaline junkies who prefer structural sabotage over gentle sensory play.

Gravity is undefeated

Speaking of things pulling things down, let's talk about the actual turntable playing the Dijon album. When the twins were immobile little blobs, having a record player on a low Ikea shelf was fine. They just lay there, listening to the crackle of the vinyl, looking vaguely confused.

Then they learned to crawl. Then they learned to pull themselves up. Suddenly, my prized audio equipment became a mortal threat. The NHS website has a rather bleak, terrifyingly specific section on blunt force trauma from falling furniture, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission apparently ranks falling electronics as a leading cause of toddler injury. I looked at my 15kg amplifier and the turntable sitting precariously on top of it, and realized I had built a highly works well booby trap in my own living room.

If you're bringing any kind of audio equipment into the nursery to save your sanity, you'll need to tether the heavy furniture to the wall and somehow hide those strangulation-hazard speaker cords behind plastic trunking before your kids figure out how to pull the entire sound system onto their own heads. I spent an entire Sunday afternoon with a drill, several heavy-duty wall anchors, and a lot of swearing, just to make sure my music habit wouldn't result in a trip to A&E.

Making peace with the mess

Parenting is basically just a series of compromises between your ideals and your exhaustion. You start out thinking you're going to only buy hand-carved wooden toys and dress them in undyed linen, and by month six you're just thrilled if they're chewing on a piece of plastic that isn't actively banned by the World Health Organization.

For teething, we ended up getting the Bubble Tea Teether Silicone. It's fine. It does the job when the teething gets biblical and the drool is flowing like a river. It's food-grade silicone, so I don't have to worry about phthalates, and the little textured bits seem to offer some relief. Half the time they still prefer gnawing on my collarbone or a random wooden spoon from the kitchen, but the teether is a decent distraction tactic when I'm trying to change a particularly explosive nappy.

honestly, you do what you can. You throw away the PVC playmat when you finally learn what's in it. You buy the organic cotton when you can afford to, to save their sensitive skin. You bolt the record player to the wall so you can safely listen to music that reminds you you're still a human being. And when it's 3 am, and it's raining, and they're both screaming, you drop the needle on a record that understands the chaos, and you just ride it out.

If you're ready to ditch the toxic plastics and want to invest in materials that won't keep you awake at night (even if your kids still do), take a look at our organic and sustainable collections.

Questions I frantically googled at 4am

How can I tell if my old baby gear is made of PVC vinyl?
Honestly, it's a nightmare. If it's flexible, plasticky, and waterproof, and you don't see a specific label saying "PVC-free", "TPU", or "100% silicone", it's probably PVC. You have to hunt for the tiny recycling triangle. If there's a number 3 inside it, chuck it in the bin. If there's no label at all on a cheap wipe-clean mat, I wouldn't risk letting a baby chew on it.

Are older vinyl records dangerous for babies to be around?
The records themselves are totally fine as long as they aren't eating them (which, given the price of vinyl these days, I wouldn't think anyway). The danger isn't the chemical makeup of the record playing on the turntable; the danger is the heavy turntable, the amplifier, and the tangled speaker cords pulling down on top of a toddler who decided to use the audio rack as a climbing frame.

Is organic cotton actually worth the extra money?
In my experience with twins who had terrible eczema, yes. Regular cotton is heavily treated with pesticides and synthetic dyes that linger in the fabric. Organic cotton breathes better and doesn't trigger those angry red rashes. It's one of those things where you end up buying fewer, better quality items rather than a mountain of cheap synthetics that irritate their skin.

What's the safest material for a baby to chew on?
Food-grade silicone is generally the gold standard right now, alongside natural, unpainted wood. My doctor mumbled something about silicone being inert, which basically means it doesn't break down and leach chemicals into their mouths like cheap plastics do. Just make sure whatever you buy is one solid piece so they can't bite off a chunk and choke on it.

Does listening to music really help with the newborn phase?
It absolutely did for me. It breaks the agonizing silence of the night feeds and drowns out the ringing in your ears from the crying. Finding an album that matches your mood—whether that's chaotic R&B, ambient noise, or aggressive 90s hip-hop—gives you a tiny anchor to your pre-baby self. Just keep the volume reasonable so you don't wake the other one up.