You may not believe me when I say this but I have never and I mean NEVER been so excited to do laundry the first week I was CDing my daughter. Later my love of washing my lovely stash waned a bit when I came into some issues but being the ever determined woman I am I did not give up! So, we will take it one step at a time with the first step being, water.
Water
Duh! You may say..Of course you need water to wash and to that I totally agree but you need to know your water. By this I mean you need to know if you have hard or soft water because while you may not have any issues with your wearable clothing this will cause you HUGE issues when it comes to your diapers.
I found the easiest way to find out what type of water you have is to Google it. The hardness of your water is something that your County is required to publish to public record. So just type in your search engine "Does _____ County in ____ State have hard or soft water?"
This is important because hard water has more minerals in it and requires more soap to clean and soft water requires less soap to wash properly among other issues that can arise. If you join a Cding community and you post a question regarding washing issues this will be the first thing you are asked....Do you have hard or soft water.
FYI: something like 80% of the US has varying degrees of hard water.
Detergent
You will not be able to just use any old detergent to wash your precious fluff. Many detergents contain brighteners and softeners that can build up on your diapers and irritate your babies skin. There are many different brands of CD safe detergents such as Rockin Green, Soap Nuts, Charlie's Soap, Crunchy Clean and these just name a few. I use my homemade detergent that you can find here. Some of this may be trial and error to find the right detergent for your diapers.
I am giving you this link to Padded Tush Stats. This website/blog has been an amazing resource to me in my adventurers into cloth. Besides lists of retailers and reviews of TONS of diapers they also have detergent stats . So, bookmark this site..
I have to share that my MIL said she used Ivory Snow and so did many many other people that I have spoken with that CD'd before the age of disposables. You can still find this soap and I am thinking of trying it myself.
Prepping
So you have been stalking your mail person for days anxiously awaiting your fluffy mail and it is finally here! You tear open the package like a kid on Christmas morning and there they are..Your beautiful diapers. You take them out and instantly you want to place them on your precious baby but wait! First you must prep.
Cloth diapers need to be washed before you can place them on your child. You want to make sure they are 100% clean and free of anything that might irritate you babies skin. Depending on what type of diapers you have they will need to be prepped differently.
Microfiber inserts and All-in-ones can be washed once and be fully absorbent. Follow the instructions for your particular diaper but in general you will want to line dry your covers and you can toss your inserts into the dryer. If you have an all-in-one you might be able to put them in the dryer but you should NEVER put them on high. You will damage the plastic coating on the diaper and they won't be water proof.
None synthetic material like cotton, bamboo and hemp contain natural oils. These oils need to be removed before the diapers are fully absorbent. You will need to wash and dry these diapers anywhere between 5-7 times before they are at maximum absorbency. I need to add that I used to fully wash and dry my diapers exactly 5 times before I would place them on my baby. I now feel that this is totally unnecessary. Not only is it time consuming it is extremely wasteful to use that much water to increase the absorbance of my diaper by 10 or 20 mls. After a few weeks of owning them they will be at 100% absorbency so I say just wash once maybe twice and put them on and admire your fluff!
After the Prep
After you prep your diapers and happily place it on your baby take a step back and admire your beautiful fluff then count to oh lets say 10 and you will see the biggest smile ever on your babies face...followed by the sound of the largest poo ever coming from your baby. It seems to be an unwritten law of fluff that the second you place a new clean diaper on your child they will poo in it. Your heart will break a little but remember that is what you bought it for :)
You take off the diaper and place it in your dry pail or hanging bag but before you do that know that if your baby is breast fed the poo is water soluble so there is no need
to do anything..If your child is eating solids you need to either dunk and swish
your diapers in the toilet to remove the solid material or use a diaper
sprayer or rinse in your utility tub in your laundry room..but we will
cover this in more detail later basically you need to remove the solid material. You do this for a couple of days until your pail is full or you are running low on diapers. Finally, it is laundry day so what do you do? Rinse cold or warm no soap, wash hot with soap, rinse cold or warm no soap is the easy answer. Everyone has a wash routine that they have learned though trial and error and swear by but I can give you the general gist of it and we will save problem solving for another post.
Take all those lovely diapers and place them in your washer. You will run either a cold or warm or hot rinse or full cycle without any detergent. This "rinse" cycle is to remove any large pieces of crud to allow your detergent to do its real work on the cloth.
You will then do a full hot wash with detergent.
Then you will do a rinse cycle to remove any left over detergent and either line dry or use the actual dryer to dry your diaper.
Voila! Clean diapers
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