The Reluctant Mommy Blogger

Last week, when I was at the canning party, I was speaking with another Mom who uses cloth on her baby. We sat around swapping advice on washing the diapers for a little while and I sent her an email later on detailing how I launder my diapers. After months of trial and error in cleaning them, I seem to have come up with a system for keeping the boys diapers clean.

I now always do an initial cold water wash with a few spoonfuls of baking soda. After that I do a hot water wash with some Arm and Hammer perfume/dye free detergent (as per the diaper makers suggestion.) I add one important ingredient to the detergent though! To my bottle of detergent I always add tea tree oil. This seems to be my magic ingredient in keeping the diapers clean and odor free. I find that twelve or thirteen drops does the trick.

After the hot water wash I do another cold water wash, adding vinegar to the fabric softener dispenser. I use the vinegar to restore the ph balance of the diapers after using baking powder.

A majority of the time, this system seems to work the best. Occasionally I have to do a second or third hot water wash with the detergent/tea tree oil mixture. Never more than three, though. This has been a great improvement considering that before I started using the tea tree oil I was having to do six to ten hot water washes to get the smell out, on top of the cold water washes.

I’m glad to have a system that finally works!

On a side note, two of my older sets of cloth diapers are falling apart. I got a bunch of diapers on Craigslist for really discounted prices and some of the diapers were pretty old. Right now I really wish that I had a sewing machine to fix them. Since I don’t I’m ordering two more sets of Fuzzi Bunz and I am going to try two Happy Heinys at the suggestion of a friend. She has been doing cloth with her boy a lot longer than I have and has tried many different diapers. According to her, the Happy Heinys run large. Just what my kids need!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 4:51 pm and is filed under My Life, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.