All parents feel excitement when you send your children off to school, an occasion that’s always brimming with hope and promise. While that’s still the case, the moment has a little bit of a different feel these days thanks to the pandemic, and words like “cohort,” “hybrid learning,” and “social distancing” have entered the discussion. While it’s hard to watch your children wearing masks while they’re walking to school or waiting for the bus, it’s also uplifting to see how resilient they are in the face of these challenges.
All you can do as a parent is try to help keep them comfortable while they’re being safe. A clean, fresh mask can make a big difference when your student has to wear it all day long, and ecoegg can help ensure that those masks are ready to wear, and are soft and comfortable.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Division for Viral Diseases at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD)recommend that everyone should wear a mask when in public and on public transportation, as well as on the school bus or riding in a carpool with someone outside your family group. When a mask is worn to cover each person’s nose and mouth it helps slow the spread of COVID-19. Masks work because they help prevent people who are infected with the virus from spreading respiratory droplets to others when they talk or cough or sneeze, and we all know those things all happen on the school bus and in school.
If your children are wearing washable, reusable masks, it just makes sense to wash them using ecoegg. Consider how their masks sit on their faces all day, in some cases without a break for hours on end. That’s fabric rubbing up against the sensitive skin of your kid’s cheeks, nose, and even the softest skin under their chins. And if you have a child who has sensitive skin or eczema, you already know that any kind of irritant can cause a flare-up or rash.
Also think about the smells of traditional laundry detergent and fabric softener. Sure, most of us have been conditioned over the years to consider that smell means “clean.” At ecoegg, we want to break the cycle: clean and scented are two different things. Need proof? Put your dirty clothes in the dryer with a dryer sheet and see what happens (here’s a hint, they will smell great! But are they clean? On second thought, don’t do that!).
Our ecoegg products are made to clean clothing and fabrics effectively without using harsh chemicals.Even our Fresh Linen or Spring Blossom products use food-grade essential oils to impart a light scent to clothing and fabrics, including masks. But you may consider even those smells to be too much for your child—remember, their senses aren’t yet dulled by years of use like ours!—so we recommend trying the Fragrance Free product.
Here are the steps to washing a mask with ecoegg:
First, make sure your washer is clean. We recommend using our ecoegg Washing Machine Cleaner Tablets every month to make sure the machine is clean of soap build-up from powder or liquid laundry detergent. Starting with a clean machine results in cleaner laundry.
Next, wash the masks with the ecoegg Laundry Egg of your choice, Fresh Linen, Spring Blossom, or Fragrance Free. No matter what you choose, the scent at the end will not be as strong as those of liquid or powder laundry detergent, laundry pods, and fabric softener or dryer sheets, which seem just too strong to breathe through the fabric all day.
Once washed, we recommend a tumble through a warm dryer using our lightly scented or Fragrance Free ecoegg Dryer Eggs, which will result in soft mask that’s ready to wear for the day. The nodules on the dryer eggs soften the fabric the time-honored way—gentle physical “exercise”—while their shape actually reduces dryer time.
Finally, make sure your child has a clean mask to wear, and maybe a spare to carry in a pocket or backpack, just in case they sneeze in their mask or lose it over the course of their day. After all, we’re pretty sure masks will be the next big addition to the school lost and found, along with hats, mittens, scarves and winter jackets!