This is not something I'd normally post about here, but when I was bathing my son last night I was reminded of the endless experiments we ran to stop our bath toys growing that scourge of the bathroom, black mould (mold). Mr Crafty Cactus reckons this is something that other people would like to know and I think he's right*.

I've always squeezed out all the water from the toys after a bath and that is important. However, it's not enough to stop the mould. Keeping the toys in a net to dry doesn't seem to make much difference and as ours kept falling down, I have abandoned it. Our toys now sit on the windowsill, usually lined up neatly by Mr V (anything to avoid getting out of the bath).

I tried using a weak disinfectant solution on the toys when they got mouldy. It made no difference to the mould and just served to worry me further. I didn't want Mr V ingesting mould, but I certainly didn't want him ingesting disinfectant. Those toys went in the bin (one by one, so they weren't missed).

Finally, Mr Crafty Cactus became interested. And of course solved the problem, so as to gain maximum smug points. What did he do? He first boiled all the toys in a large saucepan. I've got one I keep for dyeing things, so he used that. Then he made sure that each toy was full of water and microwaved them for a bit.

He did this a few months back and so far, no sign of the black stuff. I've continued to squeeze all the water out of the little blighters after each bath, but otherwise we've done nothing else. Problem solved. Hoorah.

As for non-slip bathmats, we just take ours out and lay it over the tub, sucker side up when it's not in use. No mould there either.

*I do have a slight concern that we are the only people worrying about this. Are we?