100 Days of Pregnancy: Day 44

Back to a post about cloth diapers...I want to talk about the things I wish I had known. Jumping into cloth diapers was a big unknown, but you do learn quickly.

One thing I wish I had known was that certain detergents do not rinse out as easily as others. We originally started with just regular Tide and then once that was gone, I bought the Tide Free and Gentle. I washed the diapers, but one on J, and that night he woke up crying. Nothing I did soothed him and he wouldn't go back to sleep. I had no idea what was wrong, but I figured he couldn't get comfortable because he kept wiggling around in his bed. So I changed his bum, even though it was dry and that's when I realized his bum was red. So I put on some coconut oil and put on a disposable diaper (it was easier in the dark to put on a disposable). The next morning, he had a rash like I hadn't seen before. So we switched to disposables so we could lather up his bum with creams...but everything we put on just burned his bum. So I turned to the internet and saw so many posts about burns from detergent residue. I felt terrible and so guilty. It was my fault that this happened to his poor bum and because of me, he was in pain! I went to the store and bought regular Tide again and rewashed all of his diapers and ran a few cycles of just a hot wash. I wanted to make sure all of the residue was gone. It took a good week for the burn to finally go away. I ended up buying a pretty expensive cloth safe diaper cream and it worked well. It didn't burn his bum at all when it was applied which made me feel a bit better. So all of this is to say that the Free and Gentle and Free and Clear detergents are much harder to rinse out...I wish I would have read that before I switched. And remember, always run extra rinse cycles at the end of your wash! 

Another thing I didn't know about was that not only can your baby get a burn from detergent residue, but they can also get an ammonia burn. Babies tend to get these from ammonia build up in the diapers (meaning the diapers aren't coming clean like they should). If your baby's diaper smells like ammonia as soon as he pees, you know you have a build up and you need to strip the diapers. If the diaper just smells like urine, it's fine because that is expected.

That's about it for the things I wish I would have known.

As for my day, today was officially my last day at work. It was pretty busy and I couldn't believe how much stuff I had to bring home. The thought of putting it all away was stressing me out throughout the day. Very silly to stress about that but I think it's because my nesting instinct is kicking in again. I'm hating clutter of any kind so right when I got home, I put everything away. Over the next few weeks I bet I'll be going on a cleaning frenzy.