Day 4: 3rd Annual Flats and Handwashing Challenge

I am participating in the 3rd Annual Flats and Handwashing Challenge hosted by Dirty Diaper Laundry. Today's blogger topic is "How's the Handwashing Going?"

Since this is the first F&HWing Challenge that I'm participating in, this is also the first time I've really hand washed diapers! I was a little nervous going into it, but I've found it to be pretty easy. Since I'm washing each day, I'm just storing the dirty diapers (once solids are removed) in my dry washing bucket rather than my diaper pail. This means my pail liner is staying clean (yay, one less thing to wash!). Each day we have dirty diapers coming home in a wetbag from daycare. I clean them off and put them in the bucket right away.   Normally I wash my wetbag each time I was diapers, but this challenge has made me realize I could probably go every other wash day, it's not getting stinky at all! This will also prolong the life of it I'm sure!

I've been doing my washing in the evening. I fill the bucket with water and place it in my slop sink. Then I just do some good hand agitation to really flush everything out. I drain the water and squeeze it out of the flats by pushing them down with the bucket on it's side. Then I fill the bucket with hot wash and a tablespoon or so of Tide Original. In just these few days, I quickly learned that a little detergent goes a LONG way! I was doing a LOT of rinsing the first day when I used way too much! I do another few minutes of hand agitation then let them soak for a bit and go do something upstairs. Then I come and just rinse them in warm water till the water runs clean.

I hang my covers up right away and squeeze as much water out of the flats as I can. Then I hang those up as well. I have a folding rack (pictured on Day 1) that I use outside, and when we have less than ideal weather, I use my Duo Drying Rack hanging on our shower bar. It takes a little longer to dry inside, but still only a few hours.

I never would have imagined just how easy handwashing is. We have several camping trips planned this summer and I'm excited to try hand washing in the great outdoors!