Kids Mattress

Cleaning a house when a baby arrives takes a backseat for many. The baby’s room will have been cleaned within an inch of its life anyway during the last nesting round, so it can be left for a little while. But as life gets back to normal, cleaning should make it back on the important list.

After a few months, turn your attention to one of the most used items in your house: the mattresses. It’s likely that your bed will have been used for nappy changes and nighttime feeds, and your baby still spends at least 70% of its life in bed. Older sibling bed-wetting, baby’s spit up and leaking nappies can damage a mattress if not cleaned quickly.

Aside from the external damage, tiny creatures – dust mites – live in our bedding and feed on our shed skin cells. They can excrete up to 200 times the weight of their own bodies during their life. The females lay over 300 eggs every 3 weeks. They can live up to a year without eating anything.

Take a peek under everyone’s sheets. Is it time to give your bed linen and mattresses a really good going over?

If you have a wet bed, spit up or spill on the mattress clean it up as soon as possible. If it still needs work, here are some tips.

As soon as you see the wet on the mattress, clean it thoroughly by dampening a cloth with a mix of mild detergent powder and warm water. Go over the whole stain, rubbing from the inside of the stain and working out in a clockwise spiral. Use another cloth, dampened in warm water, to rinse the solution out, then leave the mattress to dry for as long as possible. If baby needs the bed within a couple of hours, consider using a hairdryer to help the drying along. Only put bedding on again when the mattress is completely dry.

Another little treasure is bicarbonate of soda. It is great at removing unpleasant smells from mattresses. If you’re cleaning a wet bed, when you’ve finished with cleaning, rinsing, shake bicarb of soda over the area and leave it while it dries. When it’s all dry, vacuum the bicarb up – and the smell with it.

Unless you are incredibly lucky, at some point in your parenting career you are going to need to clean a mattress. Making sure you have waterproof mattress protectors down will save you

a lot of scrubbing, so they’re worth investing in to keep your mattress in great condition for as long as possible.