Our play pen was kept at our cabin for our older child to sleep in when we stayed there. However, we never really got around to cleaning our cabin (or staying overnight) so our play pen stayed there just getting dirty. Plus, it was a used play pen to begin with and long story short, this thing was probably really dirty and we just didn't know it. None of it was visible dirt. As far as we knew, our daughter never pooped in it or even spit up on it.
As part of my nesting (even postpartum. Does postpartum nesting exist?), I decided to clean it. I found this idea and found it worked wonders! I'm sorry I don't have pictures to show you because my husband did all the work (c sections are great excuses to get your husband to do things for you) but our bathtub looked like the before and after pictures in the link. At first we thought maybe, just maybe, it was dye or something from the play pen itself because ours has a brown theme. But after draining the tub, we found all this grit and residue. Definitely not just dye!
Gross to think we had our child stay in that filth but hopefully it somehow wasn't that dirty back when we actually used it! I will also mention that to get the play pen out of the tub and onto our back deck to dry in the sun is hard work. David said it was quite heavy. Our play pen is by no means light to start out with but to add water to that, it probably weighed as much as a baby elephant! Okay that may be an exaggeration and David had no problem carrying it but I am not convinced I would've been able to carry it through our entire upstairs, down the stairs, through the entire downstairs, and out to the deck without complaining at least a little bit (or taking rest breaks along the way).
I highly recommend you do this if you at all think your play pen could be harboring filth like ours. Now I wonder if you can use this method for other things like strollers or car seat covers.
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