How to Clean Rubber Ducks and Other Bath Toys
Jolie Kerr is a cleaning expert, advice columnist, and New York Times bestselling author of My Boyfriend Is Boiling In My Purse … And Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha About . Her flagship column, Ask a Pure Man, debuted in 2011. Here at Offspring we’re launching a new iteration of it, with a focus on parenting and all the mess it brings.
Jolie, damn RUBBER DUCKS. My daughter loves them, but I stopped putting them in the bathtub with her because they get moldy and then she puts her mouth on them and then she actually makes a beer bong out of mold water. Is there any solution to this problem other than stripping her of her bath toys ??
Yeah, yeah, I got you covered! It’s so common and incredibly frustrating that people who make bath and teething toys don’t take mold growth into account during the design process. I can’t tell you how many swearing emails and texts I received from my parent friends during the entire Sophie the Giraffe scandal . It was crazy to me, and I wasn’t even the one to stuff the child with mold spores! To be honest, I’m still mad at this giraffe guys.
As annoying as it is that bath toys have this rather serious design flaw, the good news is that removing mold is a fairly straightforward task, in most cases effortless. Today we’re going to take a look at a few of the options you have for this.
But first, let’s talk about the word I used, “options,” because that’s an important part of my approach to this work. Ask a Cleaner has a clear point of view; you can expect to get a lot of information about the products and methods you can use to solve any particular cleaning problem, but you won’t get much official guidance on which choices to make. This is because we are all adults with free will – and also because my primary education took place in Cambridge in the late 70s and early 80s, and I cannot shake the whole spirit of that time – Free To Be You And Me – and I’m not the type to tell you that you should (should, should, should!), say, use bleach to kill mold, whereas white vinegar is also a great choice for this operation. You can decide for yourself based on the information I give you! A few more things you can expect from this column are kindness, humor, sincere conversation, and a lack of judgment. Life is too short for me to waste time shaming strangers because they don’t care that their pillows have never been washed. And I also don’t sleep on your pillows.
Mold destruction
Good! With this introduction finished, let’s talk about mold blasting. There are two approaches: either soak the toys in a mold-killing solution, or boil them. If you choose the boil method, you can use plain water or a solution of equal parts white vinegar and water. If you choose the long-term steeping route, dilute ½-1 cup white vinegar OR chlorine bleach in a gallon of water, but never right away. In terms of how long to soak toys in a vinegar or bleach solution, an hour to night should be fine.
It should be noted, however, that some toys, such as Sophie’s monster (seriously, I’m so angry about what Sophie did to my parent friends) cannot be cleaned with these methods due to the type of rubber she made. from, so it’s always worth checking the manufacturer’s instructions. (Here are Sophie’s washing instructions .) Luckily, it’s pretty easy to do this these days thanks to Google.
Removing cleaning agent residues
So now you have mold-free rubber ducks, but maybe you’re thinking, “This whole thing is covered in bleach, it seems … isn’t it?” No problem: put the ducks in the dishwasher on the top rack and wash them just like you do the dishes. And in fact, if you think about it, later on, if you think about it, regularly throwing them in the dishwasher – once a week or so – will help keep them out of all sorts of annoyances that you might not need. in your child’s mouth and / or in the bath.
Preventing mold of bath toys in the first place
At the risk of blowing your head off by adding another task to your already ridiculously busy life if you’re so inclined, there is a simple thing you can do to prevent mold in the first place: plug the holes with glue using a hot glue gun. This way, water will not be able to get inside the toys, and mold formation will not even be a problem that you need to solve. There are two caveats here: 1) You will need to check the adhesive from time to time to make sure it is not flaking. We don’t need a drop of hardened glue stuck in a tiny trachea! And 2) it is worth considering how you feel about applying glue to a toy that is likely to be gnawing at your most valuable cargo.
You can also go the other way and poke a BIGGER hole in the bath toys. This will allow water to drain and air to circulate, reducing the presence of moisture that mold loves. It also allows you to climb in and clean the toys with a cotton swab or rolled paper towel.
So! There are options here besides depriving your kids of bath toys, which I think we can agree on is a grim fate that we are all glad to avoid. Do you have any other ways to deal with mold problems in bath toys? Let us know in the comments! More importantly, do you have any questions that you would like to see in this column? Send your inquiries, big and small, to joliekerr@gmail.com .