Regenerative-Soul's recent activity
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Comment on Newborn babies, baby registries, first year of life, and sustainability in ~life
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Comment on Newborn babies, baby registries, first year of life, and sustainability in ~life
Regenerative-Soul Link ParentWe use cloth diapers for our 1.5 year old (hopefully potty training soon though) and will definitely be using them again for our second due in Dec. I also hate throwing things away, but there are...We use cloth diapers for our 1.5 year old (hopefully potty training soon though) and will definitely be using them again for our second due in Dec. I also hate throwing things away, but there are other benefits too. Washing becomes a daily thing that you do on autopilot, so you don’t have to think about it much and you will never run out of diapers at 2 am or forget to buy them at the store. Also, they smell A LOT less than disposable diapers. Disposable diapers smell awful even before they’re used, and once they have pee it’s just really terrible. Also since you are washing the diapers every day you never have ultra-disgusting diaper trash building up. Also they hold in the poop explosions sooooooo much better than disposables. And they are cuter. There are tons of different styles that fit differently and different people like better or not, so starting out with a few of different sorts is usually a good idea.
In terms of washing, it’s really pretty simple. One important thing to know is how hard your water is. The harder the water, the more detergent you need. You should be able to determine this either through your municipality or water testing if you have a well. Then you look at the detergent box/bottle and use the dosage for heavy soiling for your level of water hardness. Different detergents work better/worse. Ones with enzymes are better but can be difficult to find if you are trying to avoid fragrances and other toxic chemicals in detergent. Personally I use Attitude liquid and I have soft water, I add a scoop of oxygen bleach too.
Daily you should do what is called a prewash, which is a shorter cycle with half the dose of detergent as the “main wash” I do a hot (60 Celsius) wash for 1:18 minutes (it’s the shirts cycle on my Miele machine, with the shirt option selected). Then every few days (this will be determined by how many diapers you have/how big your machine is/etc) you wash all the pre-washed diapers in a “main wash” which should be a longer cycle. I use the Cottons program on 60 Celsius. It’s about 2.5 hours. You can get away with 40 Celsius water (warm) if your detergent has enzymes, though doin* a hot prewash (especially if you use cloth overnight) can still be helpful. For all your washing questions I would recommend the Clean Cloth Nappies group. They have a great website that explains everything. It sounds complicated at first but it’s really not
Meconium surprisingly washes out really easily!