Time Flies and Flats Challenge

Why do the baby and toddler years go by so fast? I know it's so cliche, right? But, now I understand why everyone always complains how fast their children grow up. I now have a one year old and a 3 year old.

I have been MIA on my blog since last October. The reason was frankly, I wanted to cherish the holidays with my family. My children(and myself for that matter) will never be this young again.

So here I am, almost 7 months later, finally getting around to chronicling my time. Now that things have slowed down a bit, I can update my blog with happenings around here.

The holidays were amazing of course, and much nicer without having to worry about taking a picture of everything to post! I also took a break from Facebook for almost the whole month of January. It was an awesome cleanse! There really is a whole world around me that is passing me by, while I spend hours scrolling through other people's lives! Who would have thought, right?

I also had some medical issues I had to figure out over the last few months. (That's a whole other post). But I have changed my diet (cleaner eating, more organic and less processed foods), and started working out (p90x3), which will also be another post!

So what am I going to talk about in this post, you ask? Well cloth diapers of course!

This year I am super excited,..seriously giddy that I get to participate in the 5th Annual Flats and Handwashing Challenge! My husband is pretty sure I've completely lost my mind. Why would anyone be excited about hand washing anything, let alone DIRTY DIAPERS? Well it's all to raise awareness of how cloth diapers can be a great choice for families in hard economic circumstances, even if they don't have a washing machine.

There are a few different ways to hand wash the diapers, but the way I plan on doing it is using a bucket and plunger. Something like this. I would love to get a wash board, but I probably wont find one in time.

So far I have prepped all my flats. They needed a good cleaning and stripping, so I stripped them by soaking in very hot water with a little Calgon water softener, then washed them and rinsed. That's it! It works really well at getting out all the gunk from our hard water. No need for extra rinses, since I've found they just add all that junk back into the diapers.

Then I put them on the line to dry. It was a really windy day, so they dried in no time!

We have been using our prefolds and covers lately, and I'm trying to save my super clean flats for the challenge. I do have some things I'm a little worried about. We have been using disposables at night for a while now because Lyric is a heavy night time wetter. He's actually pretty heavy all the time. So my plan is to add some sort of extra night time absorbency. I have a bunch of heavy bamboo fleece that I had ordered to make inserts for my Brother'sBinky pocket diapers, so I think I might cut some squares and just tri-fold it and put it behind the flat. We will see how that goes. Another thing that will add to the challenge, I just started watching two other children during the weekdays. One is 11 months, and the other is 2 1/2. So now I will be doing the challenge with 4 little ones running around. This is definitely going to be interesting!

If it goes well I will have a wash bucket for camping! That's a plus!