Our Adventures with Family Cloth

Back in April, Ingrid and I stopped using toilet paper and started using family cloth.  I wrote a post about it on my other blog, here.  After months of this, I've become so used to it that using regular tp when we are washing the cloths feels strange to me.  And very wasteful.  I'm throwing something in the toilet and I'll never see it again.  Some might say "EXACTLY!!" but to me it feels wasteful when I could be doing a load of laundry and reusing cloth wipes.

We have a simple system--I cut up some flannel and sewed two pieces together.  We keep them on the back of the toilet in a plastic container. 

We use them and throw them in a little red bin that I keep a pillowcase in.  We have three pillowcases just for this occasion--none of them end up on our bed!!  When we are running low on wipes, I do a load of laundry.  Shake out the pillowcase, hot water with a double rinse, and a scoop of oxy-clean along with detergent.  Dry in the dryer, and then, according to Ingrid, comes the fun part.

She will take a basket of clean wipes and play for literally hours!  Yesterday was such a day, which led me to writing this post.  She goes through each wipe and says what's on it (we use patterned flannel, with frogs, trucks, skulls, etc on them.) She has favorites, and loves to choose which one to use.  While sorting through the wipes, she makes piles and has just started to match up like wipes.  This is something she does every time we wash them--if I say there's a load of wipes in the dryer, her face lights up and she says "can I make a pile of wipes?!"  As if that's the greatest gift I could give her, bless her.

I was just thinking about how she would not have this much "fun" with toilet paper.  And that made me happy.  She finds joy in the simplest things!