Have you ever had someone try to "help" you with your diaper laundry, only to completely screw it up? These can be really expensive mistakes, too! The Eskimo and I have been staying with my parents for about a month now. While it has been great for the Eskimo to be able to spend so much time with his grandparents, diaper laundry has become a bit more difficult. My parents' washing machine is smaller than ours at home, so that means more frequent, smaller loads so the diapers have room to agitate and really get clean in there. This means doing diaper laundry every day, every other day at the most. This is fine, except that there is only one washing machine in a house with three adults and a baby. A couple weeks ago, I had run the preliminary rinse cycle on the diapers, but hadn't gotten back to the machine to actually wash them. By the time I got over there, my mom had thrown everything in the dryer and dried it for me. Not the end of the world, but a bit of a pain.
However, last week, my dad thought he was being terribly helpful by throwing over the diapers into the dryer for me. Normally I appreciate people helping with my laundry, but in this case, he dried my entire stash on high heat. HIGH HEAT. This is bad for two reasons. First, everything that can shrink, does. Second, high heat is bad news for anything with PUL, ie, diaper covers, pocket diapers, AIO's... um, everything that isn't an insert or a prefold. High heat can cause the waterproof layer to separate and essentially render them useless. Yeah. Oops.
The good news is that most of the diapers were fine. The prefolds shrunk a bit, but I have tons and tons of those, so I'm not worried about it. It was my older Fuzzibunz pockets that ended up being worse for wear. These are actually my least favorite diapers anyway. They don't fit well and leave the Eskimo with a great big bulge in the front that is NOT attractive.
My dad was horrified that he may have ruined all my diapers and has offered to replace anything that was damaged. So, time to go shopping for new fluff! Hooray! This has actually worked out really well for me because I get to replace my least favorite diapers with anything I want! I see a couple new Bummis Easy Fits in my future! I've called around and it turns out a local shop sells them, which makes me incredibly happy. I'm all about supporting local business, especially ones that carry cloth diapering products. I want them to know that it's appreciated and that there are those of us out there who make cloth diapering a priority.
Anyway, I guess the point of this post is that it's important to educate all members of the household on your diaper washing routine. They don't have to do it for you, they just need to know not to mess with your diapers. If they need the machine, they can either come and get you or put everything in a basket to wait for your return. My parents now know not to mess with the diapers. They're pretty sturdy, but knowing that you could melt hundreds of dollars worth of diapers with a spin around the dryer should be enough to scare most people off. Don't touch my fluff! :)
