CLOTH DIAPER STAINS 101

I get a lot of questions about cloth diapers. In our family, this is what works for us: P wears cloth diapers whenever we are at home or just going around the city. However, whenever we are out traveling, we switch to disposable diapers. Diaper space (especially for air travel) is always a challenge, plus the time factor in washing clothes.

Speaking of washing, in a gist, a breastfed baby’s stool is usually very easy to clean because it’s mushy/soft, plus it has a relatively pleasant smell. However, stool after solids is a whole different animal, haha.

Someone washes our household’s clothes for us, so before I made this blogpost, I really made sure she did a comparison of the regular baby-friendly laundry detergents we have at home and tell me which works for what we all dread whenever babies start solids: STAINS!

So in this post, let me share with you how Daday keeps our cloth diapers stain-free!

STEP 1:
Before washing the diaper/ diaper liner, throw any solid stool straight to the toilet bowl. Voila! Most of the dreaded stool is gone!

STEP 2:
Get your CYCLES Stain Soaker For Babies and a brush ready.

STEP 3:
Brush the cloth (diaper/ liner/ lampin) under running water. If you do this right after the baby passes on stool, you’ll most likely wash out most the stains. Hooray!

STEP 4:
However, this isn’t always the case. In our household, sometimes, soiled diapers don’t get washed until the next day, because as you know, babies also pass on stool at night. This is when the Cycles Stain Soaker really works for us. I know it does, because when we ran out of it, Daday panicked and told me to look for it ASAP. LOL.

Basically, she puts powder where there’s still stain and makes the powder sit there for a while.

STEP 5:
And then she brushes the cloth again. Sometimes, she says, this is not enough because the stain’s been there for a while (say overnight). When this happens, what she does is, after putting the powder, she pours boiling water on the cloth, too. Then she lets the boiling water sit on the cloth for awhile (about an hour, she says). If there’s still a little stain, she brushes it some more. She swears by this.

STEP 6:
After that, if the cloth still has some foul smell, she leaves the cloth in a pail overnight (not with water). Then she washes them the next day. If there’s no smell at all, then she proceeds to wash it. She just washes it with water (no extra detergent needed anymore).

STEP 7:
Hang the cloth diapers/liners on your clothesline – if you can hang them right under the sun, the better!

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SOME NOTES:

In our experience, the laundry detergents we normally use for P’s clothes don’t work for the stains. However, I need to note it here that we only use mild laundry detergents for him and for us. To learn more about my search for laundry detergents, you may read my post HERE.

PS: For urine, Daday says there’s no brushing needed. All you need is to wash it with regular laundry detergent with your hands under running water. But, just like with stool, if there’s a foul smell, you can leave it in a pail with water and laundry detergent overnight.

Hope this post was helpful! If you have tips on how you keep your cloth diapers stain-free, would love to hear them, too!