White Bar Soap ~ Your new best friend ~ Stains worst enemy!

*for the stain fighting tip, scroll down*

So as you may know, Babies make Lots and Lots of Messes! I mean LOTS. My little darling Ava blew out of more diapers than I knew what to do. I switched and switched brands... It must be her petite frame because no matter what brand I used, we had blow outs! I am just glad we were blessed to have had enough clothes to last her roughly 3 clothes changes a day for a week! (maybe it wasn't that bad... but it sure seemed like it at times!)  For those of you that went the cloth diaper route, Kudos to you!

My daughter was always a mover in my womb. I asked my OBGYN what that meant.. He said, "It means you are in for some trouble! You will have your arms full"!  And Boy was he ever right! Though, I didn't expect Ava to be like the equivalent of having twins! She has one of the strongest personalities I have ever seen a baby have. She lets you know when she is not happy and fast! Ava was born a mover and she hasn't stopped. This little girl is ready to take on the world and needs lots of stimulation and is easily bored. She has kept my arms full and has had me on my feet either giving her a new point of view to keep her from becoming bored or I was chasing her around the house! She definitely has had momma all to herself! I was lucky if I could even get the dishes done the first 6 months of her life! So I couldn't even fathom what my life would be like if I had gone the cloth diaper route... I'm very very thankful for disposable diapers!

So with Ava's personality, I didn't have time every day to scrub her laundry every time she freshly stained her clothing. I had to strategically plan out our laundry situation. So, a couple evenings out of the week Mick would watch Ava while I ran around doing laundry.

I had two piles of dirty laundry for Ava. A "really soiled pile" and a "dirty pile". The "really soiled" contained the blow-outs and spit ups and the other, "dirty" pile, was regular worn laundry. So once a week I would gather her "really soiled" laundry, bring it to the bathroom and scrub it with the stain remover and hot water to take out the stains.


A mother I know raved over the Dreft Stain Remover. She said she couldn't live with out the stuff. That it was a life saver and it made her daughters clothes last. So I bought the $4.00+ bottle and thought I was on my way. Little did I know I was going to break out in a sweat and that this was going to take me all evening just to remove a stain for 1 onesie!!! ON top of that, I was thinking with all the scrubbing I was doing, This brand new onesie was going to look old and worn out before I knew it. The stuff tells you to spray the soiled area, let it sit for 5 minutes, agitate and rinse in hot water... I found myself repeating this 2 or 3x even on freshly stained/soiled clothing! ...



So, after slaving over the tub, I thought of an age old trick my mom taught me back in the day for taking stains out of clothes...

 A simple bar of White Soap...

 It has to be a Bar of White Soap, 

like Ivory or Dial White bar Soap.

 (Stained with Sweet potato baby food, just for this demo... yummm)

Wet both the bar of White Soap and the stained clothing in 
as hot/warm of water as you can handle comfortably...

Apply the bar of soap liberally to the stain. 

Agitate the stain well using your hand, a soft or medium toothbrush (love this) or the clothing itself until the stain looks like it's about gone. Once I get it started I sometimes finish agitating it under,  
as hot/warm of water you can handle comfortably...

then use as Hot/warm of water you can handle comfortably 
to rinse out all of the soap and the stain residue. 

(Before i could snap the picture, the stain had rinsed itself out!)

That's it!

(Believe it or not, this is the same onesie that I just rinsed looking fresh and new!)

I barely ever found myself repeating this step. 

If you need to, repeat as needed until stain is completely gone. 

 It was as if the stain melted away! It had been sooo long since I used this age old method my mom taught me that I couldn't believe it when I first did this! The couple day old, blow-out-stains came right out of the onesie in LESS than a minute! Same was true for the fresh stains too! I was able to get a weeks worth of stained baby clothing completely flawless in just 5 minutes or less!


3 bars of Dial White bar soap cost me $2.88 at the grocery store. Under a dollar a bar! One bar lasts me Forever as long as my husband doesn't steal it to shower with!  ;)  The Dreft Stain Remover only would have lasted me maybe a handful of loads if I continued to use it.

So once I was done "un-staining" the once stained clothes, I'd combine the two piles in the wash and washed it like I normally would do with a regular load and with the regular clothes detergent I use for Ava's baby clothes.
(If you are wondering, I use, "All Free and Clear" laundry detergent and "All Free and Clear" dryer sheets. It's inexpensive and it keeps the clothes clean and I have never had a problem on Ava's sensitive skin)


I hope you are able to use this helpful tip for just about any stain on clothes. 
               (Onesie Post Stain. Looking fresh and new)

*** Here is a tip if you are dealing with BLOOD STAINED clothes ***
... Use ICE COLD WATER when handling and rinsing the blood stains. Not all blood stains come out well with the white soap but the tip is, the Sooner you tackle the stain, the quicker and more thoroughly the stain is removed.  Hot Water will SET the stain... NEVER use HOT WATER on BLOOD STAINS!

Hello and welcome!

Hello and welcome to my new blog! My name is Nicole and if you haven't read it already, I'm a Wife, Mom, Photographer and Blogger. Though, this wasn't always the case! I was at one point an independent woman running the rat race in the working world. I had dreams and high ambitions of going some where and doing something with "my independent" life. I dreamed of going to college getting a nice degree in art and business attaining a job as a graphic artist and eventually working my way up the corporate latter and becoming a CEO of my own and or "a" company.  But the way "I had dreamed" of it all happening all came to an end at the age of 20.

My mother had passed away from cancer when I was 20 and my only sibling, my younger brother, was only 16. My loving father, the love of my mothers life of 30+ years, suddenly decided to moved on with his life without us. I was suddenly alone with my brother to face the big cruel world. A drastic change from a sheltered cushioned life I lived the first 20 years of my life. Suddenly one day my mother wasn't feeling well and the next day we found out she had stage 4 cancer. I found myself quitting college to take care of my mom. There was no questioning it or thinking twice about it! I was there for my mom until the end and did it lovingly and wholeheartedly. It was honestly the best thing I could ever have done. Little did I know or fathom that 4 months later I would no longer have My mom to laugh with and hug. Those few months were a blur but those 4 months had the most impact on my life until now... Until I became a mother.

I met my loving Husband 5 years ago next month at a private party where he was the guitarist in one of the biggest entertainment bands in Detroit. Need I say it was love at first sight? Two years had gone by since my mom had passed when I met my husband 5 years ago. I was twenty two and I was running the rat race. I had tried to go back to college. I applied and talked to everyone I could and "they" all pitifully said, "unless I had a baby (OH! and not that they condoned it... yeah right!) or got married, I was still qualified under my fathers tax bracket until the age twenty five" (even though I lived on my own, worked 2-3 jobs and was no longer under my fathers income)! Twenty Five! Three years seemed an eternity away! While all of my friends were already graduating from under graduate studies, I was still stuck in my second semester of College from 2 years ago! So I did what I knew best... kept running the rat race. I went from cleaning office buildings to working in a really nice one as an office assistant until my Husband in a way rescued me of that life when he asked me to marry him and told me to follow my dreams. By this time, I had really got to know myself and what I loved and decided to follow my dreams and peruse a career in Photography. Its been a life long love that I thought little made an actual career out of. That is until a friend from work asked me to be a second shooter for her with her photography company and she taught me the ropes of the industry. Since then, I have been taking my passion, my love and turning it into my career and my own business. See I still am getting there.. I am still becoming the CEO of a company... My Company! It hasn't happened the way I had originally dreamed, not as fast and not in the direction I thought it was going to go... Life got in the way, but in the end, with perseverance, your dreams can still happen!    

So why am I creating THIS blog? Well, I love photography and I LOVE to Write! If you couldn't tell already! ;)  Since becoming an accidental House mom... (Oh yes How did I become one? ... I'll tell you below) I needed something else to do besides feed, burp, sleep, clean, take photos and repeat. I'm not a fan of the constant same old ~ day in and day out repetition. So I decided to start a blog (this blog) where I can sit down during my daughters naps and throw out some ideas and tips that I have found to be useful around the house since becoming a housewife/mom and blog about it using pictures, words and maybe some video too!


So How did I become an accidental House Mom?...

Well you see one day the pregnancy stick became blue and well the really pretty office building that I was working at as an office assistant for several years... Well they really liked me there and I was promoted to a nice job as an assistant in the accounting dept.  Basically the promotion and the pregnancy came simultaneously and learning a new job while having baby brain, consistently coming in late because of excessive morning sickness made it a difficult time at work.  On top of that, I think Michigan saw one of its worst winters in years! So my husband was adamant that me and our unborn child were more important than making it into work on time (and keeping one for that matter), that I wasn't allowed to drive my hour trek into work if the roads were deemed too dangerous, which unfortunately many mornings they were ice covered and dangerous... just my luck too (interesting that this year... we haven't had any snow stick to the ground, wish it were the case last year!) ... So needless to say, My favoritism at work quickly diminished to me becoming an annoyance and I felt the tables turn and at one point it seemed as though my managers were conspiring to fire me. On top of that, my HR manager was hinting to me to leave and enjoy raising my child...

So if there were not already enough red flags being thrown and signs pointing in which direction I was to go... boy oh boy... Was God trying to speak to me or what! lol!

So, when my precious daughter arrived and I looked into her big beautiful blue eyes, I was taken back to the 4 months of when I took care of my mother and how those 4 months shaped my life and my understanding of true~real~pure love and the true meaning of life... I took that and made one of the biggest decisions of my life and one that effects my family's future.. and that is to be here full time for my daughter the same way my mother was there pouring her heart and soul into me full time for the first 20 years of my life. ~ I feel for the first time in my life I have a true purpose. It's not just to be my daughters mother but also her friend and life guide. ~ xoxo