My friend contacted me a couple of months ago, because her son had wet his bed. Of course that was nothing uncommon about that, but she was a little puzzled about how to handle it. She is a very experienced mother and first grade teacher, so she usually would not call for advice on her son’s peeing problems. But she needed my help, because her son sleeps with a duvet and she didn’t know how to wash it.
In Denmark, where I am from, we sleep with duvets year round. Some have thicker ones for winter and thinner ones for summer. You can get them in many sizes for kids, so the duvet can grow with the child. Mainly duvet covers are nice for babies, because most parents put their child in a stroller (which almost looks like a bed with wheel) and they put the child to sleep outside. Even during winter months, because they say it is healthier for the child. It is quite different from the American perception, where most kids sleep with their windows closed.
Anyway, my friend needed some help and I told her that she could easy put it in the washing machine. But when I mentioned that she needed to add some tennis balls in the dryer, when drying the duvet, she almost fell off her chair laughing. She asked me ‘why’ and I told her to make the duvet fluffy again. If you just dry the duvet without the balls in can become quite flat and the feathers will stick together. When drying with some clean tennis balls they will keep banging into the duvet and it will make the feathers separate from each other and make the duvet nice and fluffy.
She came by to borrow some clean tennis balls that I keep for just that purpose and she mentioned that it might be a great idea to write this on a blog, so people will know how to dry a duvet correctly (at least the way that most people do it in Europe).
