Wondering how the washing went last night? Not too bad! I'm sure for those who handwash every day this can be a tedious chore at times, but I'm one of those weird people who likes tedious activities because they force me to slow down. Last year my dishwasher broke and I hand washed dishes for about 6 months until my parents came to visit and promptly took me to Lowes to replace the dishwasher. I wasn't in a rush to repair or replace it because I actually liked handwashing the dishes. It was relaxing and gave me time for reflection. I also have off-grid fantasies where I have one of these awesome old-fashioned wash tubs and wringers:
But alas, I had nothing so quaint last night. I washed in a basin in my bathtub with a hand plunger-looking thingy, like this: http://www.amazon.com/MobileWasher-Operating-Washing-Machine-Emergencies/dp/B003SQ7I5S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431436917&sr=8-1&keywords=hand+washer
During the day yesterday as I changed diapers I REALLY thoroughly sprayed them down with the diaper sprayer. This is a must. If I didn't have a sprayer I would have gotten some rubber gloves and toilet dunked/rinsed the diapers as I went. This makes wash time a lot easier and less icky.
I did a rinse, wash, rinse, wring, hang to dry, done! My wonderful friend Becky, who sews our beautiful diaper covers, actually spent a period of time hand washing out of necessity when she was moving and she advised me that I would have to do a lot of rinsing to get the suds out from washing them, HOWEVER, I only had to do a single rinse after washing because the Unicorn Baby Beyond Clean is an HE detergent and the sudsing was minimal even though the diapers came out completely clean and fresh! Yay! Here they are hanging in the morning sunshine (they didn't quite dry overnight):
Ok, the blogging prompt for today was "show off your stash" so here are some pictures of our stash of homemade flats!
For the challenge we have:
8 organic cotton interlock flats (these are absorbent enough to use just 1 flat for a 19-month-old, 30 lb. toddler)
8 upcycled T-shirt flats (these are much thinner and I have to double them up)
That's 12 total diaper changes for during the day.
We also have:
2 organic cotton and hemp french terry flats (these are for nighttime, and I made two single-layer boosters to go with them)
I'm trying to keep the stash reasonable, so even though I have quite the collection of wool covers over here, I am limiting myself to no more than 6 in the rotation this week, but SO FAR we've only needed 3!
Yesterday we used: 8 flats total (including her nighttime flat) and 3 wool covers to get through the day. We had 3 blowout poops and 2 covers had to be washed so I am going to be adjusting our folding methods today!
If you want to see a photo essay of how we wash and lanolize our wool covers, check out THIS POST.