Super Mom!

Ok, I might not be a super hero, but I feel pretty dang proud of this weekend's laundry accomplishment!

My 2 year old recently discovered the amazing capability her pockets have of holding junk. As I type this, I hear her saying "Oooo...pocket!" as she shoves yet another trinket in her short pocket which I will have to later remove on laundry day.

On to my weekend laundry endeavors (you can probably guess where this is going). My wonderful husband decided to do laundry this weekend. So sweet. He washed and dried two loads. I took the job of folding the clean clothes...at least I intended to fold them. To my horror there was blue, green and red crayon on EVERY. SINGLE. ITEM. Dried on crayon meets the top 10 of every mom's worst nightmares list. My clothes and the kids clothes were ruined. Are you kidding me? Now that I think about it, not a single piece of the hubby's clothes were in the wash. I tried not to be peeved with my helpful hubby, but he had only creating more work and a possible clothes shopping trip that I was surprisingly not happy about.

I didn't have a ton of hope I would be able to salvage the clothes, but I ran to the store to pick up some Oxiclean Stain Remover, refill size...I had a lot of stains to remove!

And some stain catcher sheets...

I filled the tub (I had two large loads and wanted to soak both at once) with HOT HOT HOT water. I poured in a good amount of Oxiclean, laundry soap, color safe bleach and a color catcher sheet. There were a lot of new-ish items I didn't want bleeding on to the others during the soak. I let them sit all night and when I woke up, I found the tub had drained, so I refilled it with more HOT water, and started the process over again and let them soak all day. I still didn't have much hope when I transferred the loads into the wash, all the crayon still appeared to be on the clothes. This is where the super mom part comes in (ok, maybe just super cleaner..thank you oxiclean!), I went from 2 full loads of stained laundry to 5 single pieces of clothing with just a little crayon left on them! I will be re-treating those and scrubbing them with a toothbrush and will hopefully remove the rest! PS, a tooth brush is a must have for stain removal...I use it often with the mess my kiddo manages to make on her clothes.

If you ever run into a crayon tragedy, all hope is not lost! Oh, and before you dry anything else in the dryer, start it (empty), let it heat up and wipe it out immediately after with a dry cloth. You don't want any crayon left on the drum transferring to more clothes!

Happy Washing!