Monday, October 3, 2011

Homemade Baby Wipes- The Smart Person's Version -and also some stuff about beets.

Hello blog followers. What a relaxing weekend we've had. However relaxing weekends make for busy mondays. What a crazy cluttered house we now have. Caroline refuses to sleep without being held. She's been kind of a teething beast lately. So the housework waits and I guess I'll just have to snuggle her while blogging. What torture.


Meanwhile Jonas has books to put him to sleep.

I thought about doing a cloth wipes solution post but since this site just covers it so well I'll direct you there instead. I like the castille solution recipe. Target even sells Bronners soap now so there are no excuses.

While researching cloth wipes and how to make them I found a lot of intense multiple layered/topstitched/fancy pants homemade wipes tutorials. No thanks. Have I mentioned that the pregnancy was taxing? I think so. I was not up for that. So what I did was cut up an old flannel receiving blanket (with which we were overrun) into 16 squares and serged the sides. (I do not have a serger so when I say serged I mean I used some serge-like stitch that my machine has. And when that became too time and thread consuming I switched to just zig-zagging around the square twice. I am nothing if not efficient.) The cloth wipes work very well and hold up great in the wash. This is the way to go. Do not waste your time with all of that topstitching nonsense. Old baby washcloths also work great. Don't over-think it. Why people feel they need some fleece/flannel/hemp monstrosity to clean a baby butt is beyond me.

I should also mention that we have two spray bottles, one with the solution and one with water. Spray the butt with the solution, wipe, spray with water, wipe, done. This is my method. Others prefer just soaking the wipes in the solution and leaving them in a wipes container. Do what you want. As long as you use the wipes within a week you should be safe from funkiness. I also recommend using essential oils that have antibacterial properties like tea tree and lavender oil to further quell any of the aforementioned...funkiness.

What else is new you ask? I've discovered how wonderful raw beets are in smoothies. It's also fun to juice them. Yesterday morning I juiced some beets and found Jonas licking the juicer spout after I'd moved on to blending. Yum! My father-in-law (who is often dubious of the things I eat) saw the smoothies and said, "so you've just started drinking blood then, huh?" Yep.
I'm excited to go buy some beet seeds this afternoon and plant them. How fortuitous that they are in season.

4 comments:

NIKOL said...

Your posts are making me feel like I'm about to fall too far behind to have a winter garden. I'm hoping this coming Saturday I can get out there and make something happen.

Siobhán said...

how funny... out of all of those "recipes," the castille one is closest to what we always used. two cups of warm water, two tablespoons each of a food-grade oil (washes out easier) and whatever soap, a few drops of tto, a squirt of gse, stir it up, and good to go! i always soaked my wipes and kept them in a wipes container.

my wipes are also all flannel, except for whatever free ones i would sometimes get with diaper or whatever orders. i prefer turned and top-stitched, but have some zig-zagged ones that held up fine enough.

these days? my kids are lucky enough to have clean clothes, never mind diapers. i still use cloth, but berek is hard-pressed to, so we do have disposables in the house a lot. i miss using cloth exclusively.

Siobhán said...

typed a long comment and it was eaten up. :( in summary:

almost identical to my wipes solution.

i only use flannel and prefer it turned and top-stitched, but zig-zagged holds up fine.

i miss using cloth exclusively. we have too many kids and my husband is off the bandwagon.

Clong said...

Nikol, don't feel bad. Here's what we've planted so far: Chard. The end. Unless you count the bag of peas jonas haphazardly spread while I wasn't looking.