No, I don't expect anyone to do this

I got myself into trouble. I did a two week shopping trip and posted the details on my blog... and got home and saw I had 4 rolls of toilet paper left. Whoops! That's not going to last us another 2 weeks but I can't exactly go and buy another roll of toilet paper after I announced to the blogosphere that what I bought was all that I would buy in 2 weeks.
So here I am, stuck in a problem of my own making.
Then I thought- hey, why not?
I had read on Under1000permonth.blogspot.com about the concept of cloth toilet paper. I did some googling on the subject and came up with these two sites- some info on wallypop.net and some more info on wallypop's blog. After learning all I wanted to know about cloth toilet paper, I asked my husband if he'd be willing to try something like that. He agreed to give it a shot.
But I didn't do anything on that note, because I had no push to start.

But now that I'm running low on toilet paper and don't want to go out and go shopping for the next week and a half, I started with cloth toilet paper.
When I first started cloth diapering, I bought a whole bunch of cloth wipes for my baby's little tushy. I used them a lot for my first son but haven't been using them as much with my second son.
So now I have a whole bunch of flannel cloth wipes that are sitting around in disuse.

I have a bidet- a sprayer that we bought for a few dollars and added to our toilet. Spray off to clean, use the cloth wipe to dry off. All clean. All dry. No need for toilet paper.Instead of flushing the cloth down the toilet, put it in a little garbage can next to the toilet meant for that purpose.
When washing cloth diapers, dump in the cloth wipes as well.

How is it sanitary? Well, I was my cloth diapers every two days. They sit in my laundry room. These cloth wipes are getting washed with the cloth diapers in water 200 degrees Fahrenheit, more than hot enough to kill any and all germs. And its put on a really long cycle in my machine- at least 4 times filling and emptying the boiling water. So nothing stays on it. Do I have fecal matter sitting around until I wash these cloths and diapers? Well, I first wash off. So whatever is left, yea, might be sitting around on the wipes for a day or two until I do a cloth diaper wash. But not everyone takes out their garbage every day, and if they use disposable diapers, their fecal matter can be sitting around even longer.
Does it smell? No. There's a lid on it, and so the minuscule amount of bodily waste product on each wipe that there is not any smell whatsoever.
Do I expect guests to use these cloth wipes? Definitely not. I'm not even keeping them in the bathroom. There's toilet paper sitting right there in the bathroom for anyone who feels like using it. I'm not even keeping these cloths in the bathroom- I'm keeping them with my cloth diapering supplies and taking them out as needed. So no one, aside for my readers, even knows what's going on in my bathroom.

Do I plan on doing this for good? I have no idea. For now I'm doing it till my next shopping trip. If I find it works, then why not continue doing it, at least as long as I've got kids in my cloth diapers?

Penniless Parenting

Mommy, wife, writer, baker, chef, crafter, sewer, teacher, babysitter, cleaning lady, penny pincher, frugal gal

2 Comments

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  1. Your 2 reference links that you googled to find no longer exist. Thank you though, for writing this article. It helps me decide to go forth and do this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Wallypop links do exist, they just do not work as linked above. Try these direct links: http://living.wallypop.net/infohowtoclothwipes.html and http://wallypop.wordpress.com/2009/02/28/are-you-visiting-wallypop-because-you-saw-a-blog-or-message-board-post-about-our-wipes/

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