*This post was sponsored by Tide purclean and all opinions are my own—thanks for helping to support this blog and our family!

Most of you probably know by now that we use cloth diapers with Lola and have since she was about 2 months old. While it took a bit for us to figure out our favorite kinds of diapers and our wash routine we hit a pretty good stride where we really didn’t have any problems at all with our diapers until just a few months ago. All of the sudden Lola kept getting persistent rashes and we couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. We tried experiments with avoiding certain foods (especially more acidic ones) and switched to disposables for a bit and we finally concluded that it was something with the diapers (most likely our wash routine) that was bothering her all of the sudden. We never had any smell in our diapers, but we decided to strip them and start over with a different detergent (we were using a free-and-clear conventional brand at that point) to see if that would help—which it did! But only for a short amount of time. We started having stink issues with the new all-natural detergent and even though we tried to tweak more things like the temperatures we washed on or adding in towels to the load as well to trick the HE washer into adding more water (thinking that maybe all the detergent wasn’t rinsing out) but we are still having the ammonia smell issue.

Anyways, we’ve been in the thick of trying to figure our next move when Tide contacted me and asked if I wanted to partner with them to try their new Tide purclean detergent that is a 65% USDA certified plant-based detergent that still has the cleaning power of Tide even in cold water (you can purchase the detergent here). They have an unscented version (which is good since we try to avoid added fragrance whenever we can) that also is free of dyes, chlorine, and phosphates, and as an added bonus the purclean is made with 100% renewable wind power electricity at a site that sends zero manufacturing waste to a landfill. Needless to say, I love all those points about the product and we obviously need to find a solution to our problem in order to keep continuing the duration of diapering with cloth, so we’ve decided to give it a try!

We’ve only had the chance to do one full wash routine with the new detergent but so far the diapers look and smell clean so I think we are off to a good start (they have some tips for using purclean in your wash routine here)! It really can take a bit to know when you try a new detergent how well it’s working (and sometimes you have to tweak a few things before your wash routine clicks into place) so I’ll update my main post on diapering after we give the purclean a proper try but I’m hopeful this we’ll be a solution to our diaper problems!

I’m really happy to see large companies start to respond to consumers desires for more green and natural choices (with less waste in the process as well) so I hope that this is something that we will continue to see more of across the board in all areas. If you haven’t cloth diapered before, I promise that it’s not as scary as it sounds and it’s a great way to save lots of money and keep a pile of disposables out of landfills as well. Give it a try!

xo. Laura

Ok, ok, ok…so I’ve been thinking about changing the name of my blog for a while now, but like everything else in my life, it just took a while before I could actually find the time to make it all happen. In case you are wondering, I’m not abandoning the “Band Wife” label all together, I just feel that there are other bigger parts of my life now that have eclipsed that one particular aspect (like being a new Mom for starters!) and since Todd has been sliding into less and less traveling lately, I’m not sure how much longer the “traveling musician” thing will be a part of our family— I know the musician part will always be huge, but the traveling part is up in the air as of lately.

Anyways, I’ll still leave all the posts that speak to the band wife life as I hear often through comments and emails that those are helpful to other gals out there who have to deal with traveling partners (and I’m so glad I can be of help to anyone!). And who knows, I may still have a lot more to share on that topic in the future but I’ll just do it as Gummergal instead as that feels a lot more encompassing of me as a whole and all the new roles that I’ve taken on in the past few years.

So, there you have it—it’s a small name change but I wanted to explain a little bit about why it’s happening and just assure you that if you like following along with our lives and what kinds of things I share here, all that will still be the same. Thanks for reading guys, as always I’m so glad you are here!!

xo. Laura