How to Get Rid of Baby Poop Stains

At some point, most moms will come face-to-face with baby poop stains. By following these five steps, you can effectively clean clothing after a diaper blowout.

STEP 1: Use baby wipes (they shape better to your hand than paper towels) to clean off as much as you can from the garment, suggests Courtenay Hartford, author of The Cleaning Ninja.

STEP 2: Rinse off the remaining mess with warm water in the sink, says Liz Turrigiano, cofounder of Diaperkind, a cloth-diaper service in New York City. Avoid excessive rubbing and let the water do the work!

STEP 3: Follow up with a wash in the laundry machine using the heavy-duty setting and the sanitize or hottest cycle. It's okay to throw in other clothes to make it a full load.

STEP 4: If the garment is still has stains, rewash it, but add bleach or hydrogen peroxide to the cycle.

STEP 5: Toss into dryer once the baby poop stain has been removed.

Tips for Removing Tough Stains

By following these steps, moms should be able to salvage their Baby's clothing. Here are a few more tips for removing baby poop stains–or any tough stain, for that matter!

• Don't let it sit. Address the spot as soon as you can. Throwing the stained item into Sunday's pile on Tuesday will not bode well for getting the stain out.
• Do rinse out the stain carefully with room- temperature water from the opposite side of the fabric so you're not pushing the stain into the fibers.
• Don't use a brush to scrub. You might wear down the fabric.
• Do use a stain pretreatment after rinsing. Try OxiClean, which was mentioned again and again by our experts.
• Don't throw the item right into the wash. Let the pretreatment sit according to instructions. If you launder immediately, the stain remover gets washed right off.
• Don't dry until the stain is gone. The heat will set the stain.