Thoughts on Thursday!

Hi!! Happy Thursday!! 

Can you believe Thanksgiving is one week from today?!?

CRAZY!!!

Okay- so I have a riveting topic to talk about today. Laundry. And stain removal.

I know. You better get a strong cup of coffee and settle in! HA!

But seriously- if you are anything like me- laundry takes up a lot of your time.  I do at least 1-2 loads of laundry a day and I am ALWAYS finding clothes with stains on them!

My kids are really cute- but they are SO DARN MESSY!

Um. YES. This is ME!! HA!

Awhile back I wrote a post about my favorite way to pretty much any stain out of our clothes- you can check it out here!

In the post- I shared that my favorite stain remover is Dawn Dish Soap!

It seriously gets out almost any kind of stain AND what I love most about it is that I can use Dawn on stains that I have found AFTER I have washed and dried the clothing item!

So here's an example- I was pulling clothes out of the dryer and noticed that my daughter got several grease stains on her pants...probably on pizza night :)

They are kind of hard to see- but there is one in the upper right hand corner and a bigger one in the bottom portion of the pant leg.

So I put some Dawn on each little stain and let the pants sit for a couple hours!

And here is the "after!" No more pizza grease stains! 

I am telling you- Dawn is such an AWESOME stain remover!!

Well...being the stain remover freak I am...I am always on the look out for new kinds of products that supposedly "get out any kind of stain." I go through A LOT of Dawn and finding a "spray" stain remover option would definitely help cut down on the amount of Dawn I buy!

In the last month- I have bought this Dreft Stain Remover- it has 5 star ratings on Walmart.com and I have heard of few people mention that it is AMAZING.

I also just bought this Resolve Gold Laundry Stain Remover, per the recommendation of my mother-in-law! When she was visiting, we were talking about our favorite way to get out stains- and this is her "go-to" stain remover!

Well, because I am a huge dork, I thought it would be fun to do a little comparison and see if one works better than the other!  And then I had the brilliant idea to blog about it- so yeah. You're welcome :)

Up first- one of the WORST stains (at least in my experience) to get out- ball point pen!!

We gave my youngest daughter a pen and pad of paper to draw with in church and she got marks of pen all over her pants much to my dismay.

The pen marks are kind of hard to see- but there is a fairly big mark right where the ruffle starts, and several more on the ruffles and on the right pant leg there is a pen mark about a 1/3 of the way up from the ruffles.

 Ball point pen is about the only thing I haven't been able to get out of clothing using Dawn.

So- I was pretty excited to see if either of my two new stain removers would be able to get out those pesky stains.  I treated the pen marks within 3 hours of it getting on the pants.  

As the picture shows, I used Resolve on the pant leg that had more pen marks and Dreft on the other pant leg. 

Once I sprayed on the stain removers, I did use a toothbrush to help "scrub out" the pen marks and then I let the pants sit for a couple hours with the stain remover on them.

I was so excited to see the pen marks GONE on both pant legs when I pulled them out of the dryer!!

It is totally gone!! I have always had so much trouble with getting pen marks out of shirts and pants- well this was like a Christmas miracle to me! HA!

 Just so happens on the same day that my precious Celine got pen all over her pants, she and sisters decided to go digging for worms in the mud. YUP. 

I am all about letting my kids explore and have fun- but really- sitting directly in a pile of mud in the pants you wore to church- COME ON. Help your momma out here!

After I yelled firmly, but gently spoke to my children about making good choices and respecting their nice clothes, I realized it was the perfect opportunity to test out all 3 of my stain remover methods. YAY!

So- the pants on the far left had mud and grass stains in the booty region, the middle pants, while its hard to see, had mud and grass stains all over both of the knees and the pants on the right, obviously had serious mud stains on the knees.

For the pants on the left, I used my own special concoction of Dawn dish soap and ALL laundry detergent- this is my "go-to" stain combo for serious mud/grass stains. And then I used Dreft for the middle pants and Resolve for the pants on the right.

 And guess what??? 

All of the stain removers WORKED!

Each pair of pants came out clean, without the stains.  Seriously- this made me SO happy!

(Obviously it doesn't take much :)

Okay- to wrap this all up-

My three top stain remover picks- based on my scientific testing, are plain old Dawn dish soap, Dreft Laundry Stain Remover and Resolve Gold Laundry Stain Remover.  I have not used the Dreft or Resolve stain removers on things like baby diaper blow outs or breast milk spit up stains (please tell me I am not the only one who experiences those??)- but I can tell you- Dawn does an amazing job on both of the those stains. Once the new baby arrives, I promise to do another review (I know you can't wait) and see how the sprays work on those crazy messes little precious babies' can create :) Right now my life consists of a lot of grass stains, mud stains, random stains that happen at school and food/grease stains.  And all 3 stain removers do a great job with all of those!

So what do you think??? Do you use any of these stain removers? If not- what is your favorite product/method for getting out pesky stains?

Please tell me I am not the only one obsessed with keeping my kids' clothing looking half way decent?!?

Hope you have the BEST day...tomorrow is Fri-YAY!! :)

 I am linking up with Annie and Natalie today!