The answer...

It was Saturday morning and I had my wicker basket hugged to my hip and the baby balanced on the other side. I glanced at Emma’s clothes as I carefully searched for the next step down, and noticed a wrinkled pink pull up peeking out between some jammies and a dress. While it still had it's flowers it was obviously slept in. ‘Humph’, I thought to myself. ‘Someone is not being careful when they help Emma change in the morning. I’ll have to ask the girls to pay more attention.’

I finally felt the floor solid under my feet, and passed Elsa to someone else, made my way to the laundry closet and dropped my wicker basket in front of the washer. I opened the dryer to remove Nathaniel’s clothes that I had put to dry the night before. I groaned when I saw they were still completely wet. Darn, I was sure I had turned them on. My memory has not been functioning so well for a while, but really?! Then I remembered I had purposely not turned it on because Nathaniel had been enjoying ‘helping’ me wash his clothes so much that I had decided to let him turn the dryer on. Obviously someone, or something, had come between me, Nathaniel and our date with the dryer.

Grumbling, I turned it on, and then gasped when I saw that the washer was full of towels, washed but clearly…. Not…. Dry…. I slapped them into Nathaniel’s basket and dragged them to the porch where Jenny’s makeshift clothes line still hung across the front of it. I flopped bath towels over the railings and pulled my sunglasses down so I could see to hang kitchen towels from the loose string that was flickering in the breeze. Harlie purred and rubbed her nose in my side as she basked in the sun under my dangling dish towels. I gave her dirty look to warn her off the bath towels now decorating the porch sides, and slipped back into the house. It was only 8’ish – I might get Emma’s laundry done yet before noon, if I managed not to get sidetracked too much. Hurriedly I dumped the full basket into the washer and pumped an oz of detergent into it, slammed the lid shut and moved onto the next chore.

Somewhere around two I remembered Emma’s clothes and headed back to the house from the packing shed where I had been organizing packing materials for the coming week. I opened the washer, reached in and grabbed…. that pink pull up I had seen earlier. I gave a yelp, and then laughed. Anna and Gabriela, curious as to what was so funny came over to look and had to laugh too at the pull up that now weighed at least a lb if not two and was about 4 – 5 inches thick with rinse water.
“Thank Heavens it didn’t burst.”, I exclaimed.
You see this is not the first time I have recycled a pull up, or a diaper for the matter, and I well know the mess it can make. But it had been a few years since the last time so I was quite amazed at the amount of water they can now hold. We threw it out, and I proceeded to pull the clothes out and toss them into the waiting dryer. Suddenly I gave another shriek. Darned if there hadn’t been TWO pull ups in that load and this one, while holding as much water as the first, had leaked some of its gel. The side of the washer looked as though it were slathered with a vanilla slushy! YUCK!

Moral of this story…. Umm – don’t recycle pull ups in the washer?