Laundry

I have done a terrible job keeping on top of my laundry lately.  Wednesday is my laundry day, and I usually don't get all of my laundry finished that day.  Well this morning I did't really have anything pressing on my schedule (that I knew about.  I spaced a dentist appointment.)  I was going to get my laundry done.  I worked hard all morning helping the kids do their jobs, cleaning up as I went.  I was feeling really productive.

Then my day ground to a screeching halt, when I went to rotate the wash and found this:

That is the inside of my dryer.  It doesn't normally look like that.  The black marks are melted crayon.  Yep! Missed a crayon when I was sorting the wash (or maybe Spike threw it in with the clothes when he helped me put them in the dryer.  Don't know, and it doesn't really matter).
Well, I was afraid if I put the clean clothes from my washer into that dryer, I would end up with wax on them too.  So I did some research. Run your dryer for 15 min, then clean off the softened wax.  There were many options I came across:  Some said "magic eraser."  Some said "WD-40.  On a cloth- don't spray it in the dryer, because it is flammable."  Well that one scared me.  I wasn't going to rub something that flammable around in my dryer.  I also read that you can take a powder cleaner like comet or ajax, and using a toothbrush scrub the wax off.     I opted to try the magic eraser, because I had one on hand.  It worked some, but there was still a lot of wax that didn't want to come off.

I was also concerned as to if there was anyway to salvage the clothes.  I took a look at the batch, and there wasn't a single item in there that didn't have crayon marks on it.  So more research and I found that if you soak your clothes in laundry detergent, borax, and Oxy-clean, it should take most of the crayon stains out.

I didn't have any borax or Oxy-clean on hand, so I went to the store, bought those and some ajax to clean the dryer.  When I got home I decided to get the clothes soaking

 Well I have a front loading washer, so I couldn't soak the clothes there.  So I filled up a bathtub with really hot water, 1 cap full of detergent, 1 cup borax, and 4 scoops Oxy-clean.  Soaked the clothes in there for 1 hour.

While the clothes were soaking I turned my attention back to the dryer.  At this point my older kids got home from school.  Cinderella was intrigued by what I was doing and asked if she could scrub the dryer.   So I let her.  I thought I might have to go behind her and get what she missed, but her help would be greatly appreciated.  

Once she was done, I just needed to clean all the ajax out of the dryer, and send it on a test run.  I put a few cleaning rags in there to see if I got any crayon on them.  Nope!  Came out all clean.  I was then able to rotate my clothes from the washer into the dryer.
Here is a picture of the inside of the dryer after it was all clean.

Doesn't that look a lot better?

I took the clothes from the tub, put them in the washer, and ran them through the Heavy Duty Cycle, without adding anymore detergent.  Probably 2/3 of the clothes came out clean after that.  The last 1/3 I put back in the washer, with a little Oxy-clean, more detergent and ran it Heavy Duty again.  I haven't checked it yet to see how it turned out.

So no I didn't get my laundry all done today.  But I was reminded that you need to learn to flow with what happens in life.  Even if it is a crayon in the dryer.