Our 4-year-old has a slight obsession with Angry Birds, so we decided to make an Angry Bird (yellow bird) pumpkin this past Halloween.

Here are a few things that you can try to get the best results when using soap nuts for your laundry:

• Place the soap nuts in an old sock (without holes) and crush them with something, so that they break into smaller pieces. Unfortunately, if you have sticky soap nuts, this won’t be that easy. You’ll have to breaks/rip the soap nuts into smaller pieces with your fingers.
• Soak the little bag with soap nuts for 3-5 minutes in some hot/warm water and then add the bag and the water into the washer’s drum. NOTE: Always soak the soap nuts before doing a cold wash.
• Make soap nut liquid and use it like regular liquid laundry detergent. To make soap nut liquid boil 12-15 soap nuts with 6 cups of water for 30 minutes. I usually bring the water (with the soap nuts) to a boil and then lower the heat, so that the liquid doesn’t overflow. After the 30 minutes, you’ll have less liquid than you started with, so you can add some water to bring it back to what it used to be, or you can just leave the liquid more concentrated. Once the liquid has cooled, remove the soap nuts, and pour the liquid into glass jars (or airtight plastic containers, if you wish). The liquid can spoil after a few days, so try to keep it in the fridge, or use it up within a couple of days. Experiment with how much liquid to use in a wash. I use 1/4 cup, but you might need more or less depending on your washer and your water type.
• Set the washer cycle to “heavy soil”. The cycle is longer, giving the soap nuts more time to release the saponin.
• Add some oxygen bleach such as, Oxy-Boost or Nature Clean Oxy Stain Remover, to the detergent drawer before starting your wash. Please check whether you can use oxygen bleach with your diapers. Some manufacturers might void warranty if you do.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian readers!

Photo credit

Flannel fitted cloth diaper that I made a couple of years ago. I used unbleached cotton flannel, bamboo terry, zorb and a flannel print for this one.  It’s one of the most asked about cloth diaper I’ve ever made.  It must be the beautiful print :)

It’s really hard when you see your little one suffer from eczema. When our son was 2 months old, we started to notice a few very red and raised spots on his cheeks.  At first I assumed it was a heat rash, but the rash gradually got worse.  His cheeks turned an angry red and the skin started to flake off a little. I started suspecting eczema and our family doctor confirmed it.

While doing online research, I had seen horror images of kids with serious eczema and it completely scared me.  I didn’t want my son’s eczema to become that bad.  Also, quite a few babies with eczema end up having asthma, so I really needed to find the root cause.

One of the best eczema sites I ran into was Solve Eczema, which was created by an engineer whose infant son had developed eczema.  I would recommend this site to anyone who has a child with eczema.  Even if your child’s eczema is not caused by detergents, you might still find the information very useful.  On “The Solution” page, the author discusses the different causes of eczema.  The “microbially-induced eczema” section was especially interesting to me because I’ve been suspecting this to be the cause of my son’s eczema.

After the doctor confirmed it was eczema, one of the first things I tried was a modified elimination diet to find out whether it was a food allergy.  A large number of infants with eczema have allergies to something the breastfeeding mother is ingesting, to cow’s milk protein in formula, or sometimes to the soy in soy-based formula.  I decided to remove dairy and soy from my diet and see what happens.  I kept a record of every single thing I ate for at least a couple of months.  Some days the eczema would be fine and other days it wouldn’t.  It seemed to be a food allergy, but I couldn’t pinpoint the exact foods that were causing it.  It was a frustrating time, to say the least.

Early on, I also switched to soap nuts for our laundry.  We already used products without synthetic detergents in them, but to be sure the laundry detergent wasn’t causing it, I decided to try soap nuts.  I saw no difference, so I switched back to our Nature Clean laundry detergent after approximately two months.

While my son’s eczema was bad, I tried many different natural (baby-safe!) creams, ointments, oils and lotions.  The best (for my son) seemed to be the unrefined, organic shea butter, Keys MetaCare Natural Intensive Therapy Cream when it got more serious, and my own ointments.  Coconut oil, by itself,  which a lot of people seem to recommend, did nothing for my son’s eczema.  Briefly, I thought I had luck with CJ’s BUTTer. CJ’s BUTTer does contain lanolin, so some people with eczema might actually react to it.

Other things I tried on my son’s skin:

• Rooibos tea. It’s supposed to help with inflammation. Right after using it, I would put some oil or cream on his cheeks without drying the skin first.
• Chamomile tea. Same as rooibos tea. Unfortunately, he was reacting to it a little bit.
• Salty water. Used high quality Himalayan salt and reverse osmosis water to make this. It worked great when I needed to very gently wipe his face to get some dirt/dust off the skin.  I read that it’s supposed to reduce itchiness.
• Organic jojoba oil. Might not work very well for moderate to severe eczema.
• My own ointments made with organic coconut oil, organic, edible cocoa butter, organic, unrefined shea butter, beeswax, organic olive oil, etc. I tried different combinations and ended up using a simple one made with olive oil and beeswax.  This type of ointment locks the moisture in a bit better than oil alone.  If I had to make some more of these, I think I would try adding neem oil to the ointment.
• Tamanu oil. It’s supposed to be great for healing, but my little one’s skin did not like it.

I refused to use steroid creams for various reasons, one being that my mother used the cream on my face when I was a baby, and sometimes I wonder whether that’s responsible for the bad skin on my face.  There are other reasons why I don’t want to use the cream, and if you’ve done a little bit of research, you probably know most of them.

Besides using the natural creams/ointments/butters/oils, we started bathing our son less frequently.  Whenever we bathed him, we would add a little bit of olive oil or ground up oats to the bathwater. The oil makes the baby slippery, so you have to be careful when taking him out of the water.  After the bath, we would massage some oil into his moist skin.  That seemed to prevent his skin from getting very dry.

Since babies (and older kids) scratch endlessly when itchy, you have to keep their nails short.  Also, for smaller infants, scratch mitts are great.  I made my son a few pairs of unbleached, natural fabric mitts which he loved to put in his mouth.  I would use a clean pair every single night since I didn’t want anything on the mitts to get into his skin when he was rubbing his cheeks.

With time, our son’s eczema was getting better. There was a time when he was 3 or 4 months old, that his eczema spread to his chest and was starting to appear on his back.  That was the worst time.  I was starting to suspect that part of the reason why he started getting better was that I kept breastfeeding him.  In my opinion, it would’ve been crazy to stop breastfeeding because of his sensitivity to something I ate.  I would rather become a raw vegan (a hard thing to do for someone who enjoys some meat from time to time) and breastfeed than to put him on formula (that he might’ve been allergic to anyway) and be able to pig out.

Now, 9 months after we noticed the first rash, our son is doing very well. He almost never scratches his cheeks and his rash is almost completely gone.  He still has a little bit of a rash on the back of his knees and a minor rash appears on his cheeks from time to time, but none of it is as serious as it used to be.  I suspect the rash on his cheeks is mostly due to teething.  He puts his hands in his mouth, and then sometimes rubs his cheeks with the saliva-covered hands when he’s tired or upset.  I think the saliva and the rubbing might be irritating the skin on his cheeks causing the red spots to stick around.  Overall, I’m amazed at how well he looks today.  I think in the end, three things worked for him: allergen-free probiotics, breastmilk, and time.  The effect of the probiotics and the fact that I have candida issues off and on, made me believe that yeast was responsible for his eczema.  It’s possible I will have to go on a modified candida diet in order to get rid of my candida overgrowth completely, in case I’m constantly passing it on to my little one.

The one thing I regret is not giving my son probiotics  when I first discovered it was eczema instead of months later.  I just assumed that he was getting enough probiotics via breastmilk since I was taking them myself. I shouldn’t have assumed that.

**Disclaimer **
The material contained in this post is for informational purposes only. You should always seek the advice of a professional or your medical physician before acting on something that I have published or recommended.

Photo Credit

Wool interlock trainers (with bamboo fleece insert on the right). The fabric is VERY stretchy, so they could probably be used as a cover over a trim fitted as well. I think I might try a slightly shorter rise for the next pair of trainers.

El Bee Baby cloth diaper on my 14/15 lb son

Depending on how obsessed you are about cloth diapers, you might have or might have not heard about the Canadian-made El Bee Baby cloth diaper.  It’s one of those expensive diapers that a lot of people either can’t afford or they just don’t want to pay that much for.  I wanted to make similar diapers (undyed and with simpler binding though) for my newborn, so I thought seeing this diaper in real life might help me figure out how to do it without wasting a lot of time. I was lucky enough to get one on sale and I bought it without a doubler to keep the cost down.

When I first saw the diaper, I was impressed.  It looked like no other diaper I’ve ever seen.  It was cute, the workmanship was great and it looked like the diaper took forever to make.  The unique binding looked like so much work, I almost immediately stopped wanting to make a similar diaper myself.

Pros:

• Great workmanship
• Trim
• Great fit on my son
• I found it easier to get the diaper clean where the elastic is because of the binding.  As most people who have cloth diapered for a bit know, it’s not easy to clean poop off of the elastic area of the diaper.

Cons:

• The price of the diaper is high.  However, when you think about how much work went into making the diaper, you might understand why it’s so expensive.
• Might be too trim for heavy wetters.
• I haven’t used the doubler / lay-in soaker that came with it at all because it shrunk in such a way that it wouldn’t lay flat.  I decided to use soakers/doublers that made instead.   Also, the doubler looks quite thick because of the binding, but I doubt it’s very absorbent.

Overall rating: 9 out of 10
I would have given the diaper a higher rating if it wasn’t for the cost and the weird shrinking of the lay-in soaker.

I have not been paid to write this review. The diaper was purchased by me.  All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

My daughter learned how to use the potty a few months ago when she was 2.5 years old.  I tried the 3 day potty training method when she was 25 or 26 months and it was a disaster.  She became afraid of the potty, so I stopped the training.  I decided to continue putting underwear on her when at home though instead of switching back to cloth diapers full-time.  I kept a potty in the rooms where she spent most of her time and would sometimes suggest to her to sit on the potty and make “pee-pee”.  One day, she started feeling a bit uncomfortable whenever she peed in her underwear.  Within a couple of days, she decided to use the potty (when she was running around without underwear) and after that she started going to the potty a million times a day just so that she could take it to the bathroom and flush it :D  So, in the end she learned how to use the potty almost completely by herself.