Parent Hack: Removing Those Summer Road Trip Shirt Stains

This is a sponsored post in partnership with Carbona. All opinions are my own.

We've all had those crazy thoughts, right? You know the ones. The thoughts where we think, "Let's just pile everyone into the car and drive!" It happens to the best of us. We load the entire family up and take off for the day. This usually happens in the summertime and we go to the amusement park, the fair, or the city two hours away that has the best aquarium in the state. It's a great way to bond, find out how much patience we have, listen to that annoying kids' music soundtrack 5,000 more times, and taste some fun roadside food.

If we're honest these road trips probably sound a lot better when we're planning them than when we grasp the reality of the cleanup situation when we arrive home. The car pretty much needs to be hosed out on the inside, there's a mystery substance stuck in your hair, and you're almost positive that your kids have more food on their clothes than in their stomachs. The truth of the matter is that these occasional day trips are part of parenting and they create memories that your kids will talk about forever.

Since the memories are worth the work, I want to give you one parent hack that we recently discovered to help with the road trip stain apocalypse. One of the hardest things to clean is the mashed in food on your kids' clothes. I know, I know, sometimes you wonder if you should just throw out the clothes instead of scrubbing them. Don't do it. You can rescue them! What has helped us is a product called Carbona Stain Devils. The crazy thing is that Carbona makes Stain Devils specially formulated for each stain. I learned that the cleaner that can get out ice cream is not the same as the one that can remove grease. This is why multipurpose stain removers aren't that effective. Let me show you how we used them to clean up our kids recently.

My youngest loves ketchup. I mean he LOVES it. He literally dips apple slices in it. I'm not sure that he would forgive us if we ever ran out of his favorite red elixir. Regardless, he's four years old so he eats hot dogs with, you guessed it, lots of ketchup. Which means on a road trip, half the ketchup ends up down the front of his shirt. His shirt in the photos is evidence of this. So we thought this was the perfect opportunity to try out the Carbona Stain Devils that is specially formulated for Chocolate, Ketchup, and Mustard.

My wife didn't think there was a chance that stain was coming out. First we wiped as much of the stain off as we could. Then we put a white cloth beneath the shirt where ketchup stain was. I used a small amount of the undiluted Stain Devils directly onto the stain and dabbed it, pushing the stain through to the cloth. After that we rinsed the entire shirt in warm water. It looked like the stain was all gone but we threw it in the washing machine with a load that was about to go in. I don't think we will ever use another stain remover as long as Carbona is around because it worked a miracle on my son's gray shirt. The ketchup stain was completely gone!

Let's move on to incident number two. You now how when you're riding in the car and one kid screams that the other one is touching them? Yeah well this time the other one was touching my oldest with a pen. To be technical the other one was writing on my oldest son's shirt with a pen. What was the reason you ask? There was none. Did I mention my oldest son doesn't like pink? Hence the look on his face. I'm sure the excuse was that the shirt ran into the pen...four times. Nonetheless, we are left with an ink mark to somehow remove.

We broke out the Carbona once again but this time used formula #3 which removes ink, marker, and crayon. If you have kids, you know there is no shortage of what they will write on with those three things that I just listed. We discovered it only took a little bit of this formula, and a small amount of effort, to follow the instructions just like we did with the ketchup stain.

Once again we were blown away with how well the Carbona Stain Devils worked. No trace of the ink was left on the white shirt. This cleaner is way better than a homemade cleaning hack that you would find on Pinterest. Carbona made it so easy that we couldn't believe we had never tried it before.

So if the Carbona Stain Devils removed ketchup and ink, I know you're now going through your head thinking about everything else that your kids have stained up over the last week. Let me help you out by showing you a photo of all the Stain Devils that we have. We've accumulated an entire collection now just so we don't run out. So if you're looking for the ultimate hack to cleaning up your next summer road trip, look no further than these Stain Devils. I can't tell you about a tip on the internet that we have tried that is easier or more effective to get out those tough kid-caused stains!

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