Surprise Load

I love to watch American Idol!  Rarely, however, am I through with M's bedtime rituals to sit in front of the TV by 8:00 to watch it live, so of course, we DVR it (or digitally record it) with our cable box.  This works out great, because every now and then I get the urge to do a little laundry between putting M to bed and "relaxing" for the rest of the evening.

The other night was no exception.  I knew that I was running low on clean pants for M and the uniform I needed for work the next morning was in the hamper.  So, I grabbed his hamper and a few of my things and threw them in.  

Finally, onto my show!  Well, I also sometimes have the very bad habit of becoming soooo tired while "relaxing" to A.I., that by the time it's over (usually 10:00 or so by now) I don't want to get up so I'll end up watching something else we have "saved" on our box, or the news...whatever. 

 The other night was also no exception to this habit.  Needless to say, somewhere around 11:00, I finally drug myself off of the couch and headed upstairs to change the clothes to the dryer, wash my face and thankfully sink into my warm bed. 

Very groggy at this point, I walk to the laundry room and squint as I turn on the light and open the washing machine lid.......

Now for those of you with small children, or for those who've ever had one of your child's diapers get "too full" with fluid...you'll understand what I'm about to describe next.  What I saw when I opened the wash was nothing less than an entire tub and load of clothes COVERED in slimy, gooey, "nuggets" of diaper crystals.  The kind that are supposed to stay tucked away in the fabric of the diaper and absorb the moisture.  Yeah...those...

Well, in my haste to throw the laundry in and sit down to my show I had neglected to sort through M's clothes which by now, it was clear to me, had contained a USED diaper!!

So, here I am, EXHAUSTED, just wanting to go to bed, but I can't because the uniform I need for the next morning has Gooey Diaper nuggets stuck all over it!  

It took about 45 min. and  a quick search of Google to come up with a plan:

I basically shook off every single piece of clothing I had just washed back into the washing machine (no small feat when you're washing an ENTIRE load of little toddler clothes!) and threw them into a basket until all that was left was a tub bottom covered in goo.  Then I wet a wash cloth and scraped it all out.  Then I threw in a completely different load (with my uniform included of course) on HOT with two BIG scoops of OxyClean (a Google suggestion) and went to bed praying my efforts would work.  Well, it did the trick!  On one of my several nightly trips to the bathroom I opened the wash to discover nothing but clean clothes and joyfully changed them to the dryer.

Whew!!!  

Moral to the story....

Just because your toddler can dress himself or put on his own PJ's...doesn't mean that he will think it necessary to take the used Pull-Up out of his pants BEFORE tossing them into his hamper!!:-)

One lesson painfully learned and now passed on to you!

Life is good :-)))