In my search for solutions to help my kids with some of the issues they have dealt with since birth (focus and attention, impulsivity, emotional volatility, sensory processing issues, anxiety) I began to learn that I needed to look beyond diet to see long lasting results. The more I researched the more I realized that the products we used every day to clean our home and our things were part of the problem. We have been lead to believe that these laboratory-created, chemical laden products are not only safe but beneficial and we don't hesitate to spray them around, use them on items that touch our food, slather them on our and our children's skin (hello, the largest organ in the body and it absorbs EVERYTHING!), and basically inundate our environment with them. After finding a company I felt I could trust (and I joined the company for other reasons than this--another post about that sometime in the future) I committed to buying our cleaning products from them which, admittedly, was a bit pricey for our budget. After learning more I realized just how very concentrated these products are and how easy it is to stretch them by making DIY versions of the products we use every day. One of my favorites is laundry detergent.
Unless you live in a nudist colony, or you are under the age of 5, you spend close to 24 hours a day with clothing touching your skin. You launder this same clothing in lovely smelling detergent and probably put it in the dryer with a dryer sheet or perhaps you use a liquid fabric softener. Your clothes come out smelling fresh and clean. But are they REALLY clean? The chemicals in your laundry detergent, fabric softener, and dryer sheets have bonded with the fibers in your clothes. And now they are touching your skin which is happily absorbing all of that. A quick search of the Environmental Watch Group of your favorite laundry products will show you a host of endocrine disrupting chemicals (impacting growth and development, hormones, and reproduction among other things), chemicals that cause respiratory and skin reactions, and chemical that affect the nervous system (ding ding ding I have kids who have allergy and nervous system issues). I am an avid label reader for the foods we put into our bodies and I have eliminated many things from our family's diet. But I wasn't doing the same for the other products we used (did you know that toothpaste contains saccharine and/or aspartame?). It was doing me little good to limit the toxins we were putting INTO our bodies if we continued to put them ONTO and AROUND our bodies!
I made the switch to wool dryer balls instead of dryer sheets and now make my own detergent. My clothes are clean and they smell amazing! OK, they actually don't smell like much of anything, which everyone in my family actually prefers to the heavy fragrance from our previous laundry detergent and dryer sheets (even though I have always used products with a low "smelly" factor, preferring "unscented" to anything else). The only complaints I have about wool dryer balls is they don't always deal well with the static that can build up, especially with synthetic fabrics, and I have to be more careful unloading the dryer to make sure none of the balls have hidden themselves inside clothing. I learned that setting my dryer to a shorter drying time helps with the static issue and my 5 year old likes to "hunt for balls" when we unload the dryer. More importantly, the clothes feel and smell fresh, our towels are FLUFFY, and we are saving money and time.
I use this recipe from Lemons Lavender and Laundry and it works beautifully. If we ever get a new washer I will be able to get even more loads from one gallon of DIY detergent (our washer is a 24 year old top loader that is still going strong). Young Living's Thieves laundry soap and Thieves household cleaner combined with washing soda and baking soda do a great job of getting everything clean. I can choose to add additional scent with essential oils if I want but I'm pretty happy with just the basic detergent and unscented dryer balls.
Price break down:
Washing Soda approx. $4.00 for a 56 oz box ($0.08 per ounce) = $0.16 per gallon
Baking soda approx. $1.50 for a 32 oz box ($0.05 per ounce) = $0.10 per gallon
Thieves laundry detergent $29.50 for 32 oz ($0.92 per ounce) =$1.84 per gallon
Thieves household cleaner $22.50 for 14.4 oz (1.56 per ounce) = $1.56 per gallon
Total cost: 3.66 for 128 ounces/1 gallon of detergent ($0.03 per ounce); I use 1/4 C/2 oz of detergent per load for approx. $0.06 per load
My previous detergent cost between $0.08-$0.10 per ounce which came to $0.16-$0.20 per load. I am saving $0.10 per load not including dryer sheets ($0.04-$0.05 per sheet), which I don't use anymore. That may not seem like much but it will add up over time. That's $1.00-$1.50 saved for every 10 loads (family of 5, we easily do 7-8 loads per week). Best of all I know exactly what is in my detergent and that it is safe for my family.
I've been using this detergent for approximately 6 weeks. I have noticed a definite improvement in my histamine levels (seasonal allergies would not be a player for me during this time period) and I have no scent-induced headaches (strong scents are a head ache trigger for me). My two younger children have skin sensitivities which have almost completely disappeared. It is difficult to ascertain if we are getting behavioral improvements because there are so many factors that influence that. However, any and all toxin reduction will help with that over time by allowing the body to dedicate resources used to clean toxins to other systems.
