How to Prep a Chinese Bleached Prefold Diaper

Well the countdown has officially begun.  I'm 34 weeks, 3 days.  Only 39 more days until DUE day.  So, to celebrate this moment in time, I decided to start prepping the cloth prefolds I have today.  Shortly before 8:00 this morning, I gathered up the dozen diapers that I have, along with the biggest stock pot I own, some barbecue tongs (I don't have regular kitchen tongs, but those are on the list of must haves for the home birth), my Dawn dish detergent, an empty laundry basket, and a clean bath towel.

I filled up the pot with water about 4/5 of the way.  I squirted a bit of Dawn dish detergent into the pot, and set the stove to high.  I waited approximately 20-30 minutes for the water to get up to a good fast boil.  I then added the cloth diapers.  I could only fit in 4 at a time, so I had to split the dozen into 3 groups of 4.  Once the diapers were in the pot, I used the tongs to submerge them under water, then set my timer for 20 minutes.  The diapers will float to the top of the pot, so you do have to be nearby to continuously push them back under.


While I was waiting, I decided to go ahead and fix some breakfast.  Turkey bacon, eggs and toast.  Yummy!


Cycle one of diaper boiling is finished at 20 minutes.  I used the tongs to lift up the diapers, and twist them around the tongs in an attempt to squeeze some of the boiling water out of the diaper.  

Once it wasn't drippy anymore, I dropped the diapers, one by one, into the laundry basket lined with a clean bath towel.  The bath towel is to catch the excess water from seeping through the sides of the laundry basket.  I let them sit in the basket until all my boiling was finished.  

A note of advice:  I have a dog who was quite curious as to what I was dropping from the stove into this basket.  He decided to sniff the diapers that were fresh out of the pot and was startled (and a little scorched) on the nose to find that they were HOT!  So, just keep your pets and children away while you're working on this!

After another two cycles of boiling, the dozen were finally finished with this step.  I carried the basket of wet diapers into the laundry room and tossed them into my front loading washer.
 I added a scoop of Rockin Green Hard Rock 2.0 in Barenaked Babies and set the cycle to Sanitary.  This is the Extra Hot/Cold.  I added the Pre-Wash and Extra Rinse cycles to this load as well.  The timer popped up as 2 hours and 13 minutes.



Fast forward two hours and thirteen minutes, and the diapers were washed and rinsed.
 I removed them from the washing machine and dropped them into the dryer.  After running through my Normal cycle on my dryer twice, they were finally fluffy, prepped and dry!  There was definitely some noticeable shrinkage, but they are definitely much fluffier than before!