So Easy, Even Small Children Can Do It!

Look at my little urchin--CLEANING THE RUG! Our rug always needs cleaning, but after an "incident" this morning (I'll spare you the horrifying details, except to tell you that it involved Sydney and a diaper, and I almost barfed), the rug NEEDED cleaning. I've probably mentioned before that I am obsessed with --I use some recipe from that book every day, I swear--so this afternoon I made up the Carpet Cleaner recipe (subsituting baking soda for washing soda--washing soda cleans better, but is a little too caustic for our house) and started scrubbing. Willow, seeing me up to something that doesn't immediately look like drudgery, is immediately all, "I want to help!" Help away, kiddo!

It's just about my favorite aspect of natural cleaning, particularly making your own cleaners--the kids can actually productively use them to help me clean, and since I know exactly what's in the cleaners and that they cost about a penny to make, I know that they're not harming themselves or the house or wasting money when they begin to clean a little, um, boisterously. Sydney likes to take the spray bottle of vinegar and tea tree oil, for instance, and spray, well, everything--walls, tabletops, couch, cat, floor.

When she does that, I think, "Oh, good! The baby's cleaning."

Naturally Clean

This morning, after Syd spent the nearly five minutes I was on the computer copying down a shipping address for a pendant I'd sold on etsy dropping raw eggs on the living room floor (I know two-year-olds are idiots, but ?????), I wiped up the mess and then cleaned the floor with a spray bottle full of a homemade solution of Murphy's Oil Soap, water, and maybe a teaspoon of tea tree oil. 

After breakfast (which did NOT consist of eggs--thanks, Syd!) when I put a load of dishes in the dishwasher I used Seventh Generation's dishwashing powder, which is phosphate-free. 

After the girls got dressed (well, I dressed Syd, although she promptly undressed herself, and Will dressed herself only in the striped green bloomers that came with an outfit her grandma sent for Syd. She wore those bloomers all day, until she ditched them in the side yard in favor of the wading pool shaped like a whale), I put a load of laundry in the washing machine with more Seventh Generation laundry liquid, and a couple of drops of tea tree oil since the load had some diapers. Then I cleaned out the really gross area of the basement where the main line used to overflow by essentially just dumping a bottle of hydrogen peroxide over it and, when it was finished fizzing, shoving it all over to the floor drain with a Dutch rubber broom. 

Later, after lunch (leftover macaroni and cheese, salad greens, strawberries, and hamburger buns for the girls, who are obsessed with hamburger buns), I wiped up the table with a spray bottle full of a homemade solution of vinegar, water, and a teaspoon of tea tree oil. 

God, when you break it down like that, it sounds like I actually did do something around the house today! I I looooove Natural Cleaning for Your Home, although it's really hard to find some of the ingredients the author asks for, especially things like Fuller's earth, red turkey oil, soda ash, etc. I bought from several online stores, and never did manage to score the red turkey oil. From this book I often use the Rub-a-Dub Scrub for Wood Floors on the well-abused former library table in our living room, the Non-Streak Window Clarifier, and the Spray-On Fabric Cleaner. 

I also really like Green Clean: The Environmentally Sound Guide to Cleaning Your Home because it's primarily focused on environmentally sound methods, and thus covers things that the books focused on personal health sometimes don't, such as avoiding anything disposable. I used stained or ripped and unrepairable clothing as cleaning cloths, which drives both me and Matt crazy sometimes because he can't tell the difference somehow and just this morning dressed himself for work in a yellow plaid button-down shirt with mildew stains all up one sleeve (the original reason for the cleaning cloth status) and old cleaning stains all over the back. He was completely unreasonable when I pointed this out to him. 

Green Housekeeping is one of my favorites because the author is focused on developing a lifestyle in which you spend as little time as possible actually cleaning but you still live in a very clean house. She really likes organization, and says something like you know your disorganization is a problem if you have to buy a replacement for something you know you have but just can't find, especially if you don't need a second one of whatever it is. I was really feeling this yesterday when Matt had to stop by Joann's on the way home from his softball game, bleeding knee and all, to buy me a replacement seam ripper because I had to have it to finish up an item for my Craftster swap and just could not find it. I suspect children or cats. I'll be even madder when the original seam ripper shows up again because then I'll have two and seriously, how many people in this house need to be ripping seams at the same time? This is the author who also got me hooked on the steam cleaner--no chemicals, just steam!--and the Dutch rubber broom, which is made of a stiff rubber so you can mop with it using a damp rag on the floor, and which has a squeegee at an angle to the rubber broom part, so you can dry the floor. 

Know more? Share!

Messy Monkey

I'm starting a new web shop in my pumpkinbear shop at etsy. The girls and I love to make art supplies and I then like to make natural cleaning supplies to clean up after their use of said art supplies--thus, a web shop. Here's what I've got so far:

They're little one-ounce vegetable glycerin soaps with esential oils added in--I nerded out in my product listing, listing each of the essential oils from which a patron can choose, along with its therapeutic benefits and a description of its scent. Stuff like that is important to know, though, because peppermint soap really does make you feel better when you're nauseated, and eucalyptus soap really does clear out your congestion when you have a cold. The photos are all a little grumpy because it's been raining here for days and our house basically gets no natural light, so I might replace them when the sun shines again and I can make everything look cute out on the grass.

Stuff in the future Messy Monkey shop: two more sizes of heart soaps with essential oils, soap crayons (still in the r&d phase--I tried out a recipe yesterday that left my hands indelibly stained in purple), scented baby powder, recycled and remelted crayons, and kits for making your own art supplies and art projects with the kiddos. Any requests?

Finally, Clean Lockers

At last, self-awareness--I've figured out why it takes me so, so long to clean up around here. So you can figure it out, too, I'll illustrate the process of my locker-cleaning this weekend:

1. Willow was miserable with a high fever on Saturday, so instead of doing little girl stuff all day, she spent the entire day lounging in our bed watching movie after movie after movie--screen time is severely limited in our house, so this works as a stay-in-bed tactic. I decide that since my little girl helpers are halved, this would be a great time to tackle cleaning out those lockers. The first thing I pull out is a stack of thrifted and dumpster-dived T-shirts, some of which are tie-dyed. I've been working on a tie-dye T-shirt quilt for myself for a while and I also want to make another one to sell, so I separate out the tie-dyed T-shirts and spend a couple of hours cutting out quilt panels. I happily discover that all the T-shirts are large enough to also cut out the material for a baby bib and a set of coasters from each shirt. Sweet.
2. I organize and restack the rest of the T-shirts and return them to the lockers. As I'm replacing the stack of baby clothes I'm using for a future quilt for the girls, I notice that one of Sydney's old shirts, size 18 months, has some mildew stains along the shoulder that disqualify it from quilt making. The sweet embroidery along the front is unaffected, however, so I cut that out, get on the computer and pull up all the photos I took of Sydney when she was 18 months old, crop and tweak the exposure, etc., print them out, and make this awesome scrapbook page, my best yet, I think:
3. The Monsters, Inc. (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) DVD skips because it's been watched about 5 billion times, and so Willow comes in to see what I'm doing. To entertain her, I make her some ribbon headbands for her new short hair. They're very simple:

• Measure the circumference of the kid's head where you want the headband to be. Willow is 19 inches.
• Cut the majority of this length as ribbon. For each headband, I cut about 12-13 inches of ribbon.
• Cut the rest from elastic. I used elastic the same width as the ribbon, and about 5-6 inches in length.
• Sew the elastic to the ribbon at both ends with a very strong stitch, and trim the raw ends close to the stitching. I didn't include a hem allowance here because you want it to fit a little snug, so the finished circumference of the headband should be about an inch smaller than the kid's head--that's where the elastic comes in. Make them a little roomier for growing, if you'd like.

Here's Willow rocking one of her new headbands:
4. Something like 12 hours have passed, now. I re-organize the sewing stuff and put it back into one crate in the locker. I wonder where to put my knitting stuff. I still haven't completed any knitting projects--I want to make something useful and necessary (no scarves!), but easy enough to let me practice my skills and get them into muscle memory. Hmm, I think...washcloths! They're small and square, I can practice a variety of stitches, and we have practically no useful washcloths because I keep using them for cleaning and getting them stained and gross. I cast on for a six-inch square washcloth, using my Stitch 'n Bitch Nation as a reference, and happily knit away in a simple knit stitch for the rest of the evening.
5. It's the next morning, and since I was up with Willow pretty much all night, Matt let me sleep in until 10:00 am, and then took the girls out for breakfast burritos and to try to score a Sunday paper from outside some business closed on Sunday. I knit some more, hiding in the bathroom for most of one row when Matt returns home, since I don't know how to stop in the middle of a row and I'd told Matt I'd be cleaning while he was gone.
6. I do clean for a while, finding a box for knitting stuff and organizing and replacing my scrapbook stuff, and then I pull a Scrabble board out. I used these for bulletin boards and book covers last summer, but my latest issue of had a short tutorial about how to make a box out of a gameboard. I should probably see if it works before I decide what to do with the rest of the gameboards I have lying around. I make some modifications to the tutorial, covering the inside with flannel, reinforcing the edges with pretty duct tape, and altering the overall dimensions somewhat, and it ends up taking so long--at least a couple of hours--that I doubt I'll make any of these to sell, but I might make more to store stuff in the house. It looks pretty awesome, though:
7. Matt is starting to give me dirty looks every time he passes the doorway to the study, now, so I buckle down for 30 or so minutes and finish up:And yeah, that's why nothing is ever clean around here.

Another Clean Table

At last, the work desk is clean:

I found some overdue library books, one of the girls' Planet Earth - The Complete BBC Series DVDs, a couple of tax forms, the clear packing tape we'd been looking for, a student's homework paper (oops!)--it was quite the treasure trove. I was even inspired, after looking at this very photo of the unattractive wall with the electrical cords hanging down and the one sad little postcard from our vacation to France when Willow, who is almost four, was 8 months old, to whip out my brand new duct tape in pretty colors and organize all the very, very many cords at my desk: It still looks a little wild, but they're not tangled, they're off the ground, I can see what goes with what, and they're relatively inaccessible to the babies. Up on top of the desk, now, I have a second power strip, and I've plugged all the power vampires--scanner, printer, back-up drive, laptop--into that power strip, even if I've taped their cords to the wall down below. I can easily reach the power strip on the desk top to turn it and the vampires off, and below the desk I've plugged in the stuff that isn't vampiric--desk lamp, pencil sharpener, sewing machine--and the wi-fi thingy, which needs to stay on regardless.

So I'm still going to do my next project, which is my supply lockers in the study--
--but otherwise this plan is a bust. All my previous projects--study floor, livingroom table, etc.--are as filthy again as they were before, and the rest of the house is even filthier because instead of lowering the overall filth factor of the house by a little bit every day, I've been spending most of my very short cleaning time just trying to lower the filth factor of my few project spots a lot. Sigh. So until a new plan emerges, we'll keep to our previous workable strategies of kicking stuff over to the walls when we need floor space and enforcing the rule that when you trip over something, you have to pick it up and put it away (Willow tries to get around this rule by, while getting back up after falling on her face, tears in her eyes and readying the screams, insisting, "I didn't trip over anything!").

A Clean Table

At last, at last! And mind you, this one took several days. Before...

• diaper bag
• stacking blocks
• drywall screws
• shelf board
• circular saw (have I mentioned before that my partner has a habit of doing woodworking in the living room, using those two red chairs there as sawhorses?)
• flashlight
• dirty bowl
• knit cap (temperature is in the 70s now)
• seed packets
• mail
• big purple ball
• Ziploc bags of Easter eggs
• two shaggy rugs bought for the kids' playroom we're going to build in the basement
• ornament hangers (from my last craft fair, not Christmas)
• pants

And, um, that's just the top layer. Notice, again, that hardly any of this stuff is actually, you know, MINE. But I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and my partner helped me clean and now we have:

Below the table of course, is an empty honey container and a sock and a library book and a sandal. We've eaten at the table now a couple of times, but that was yesterday, and tonight before bed I have to go back and clean the whole thing off again, because today is a new day, and a new day brings new stuff to bring into the house and pile on the table.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

A Clean Floor

Something I should admit: my house is filthy. Like, really filthy, can't walk on the floor without stepping on stuff filthy, filthy as in barely sanitary, filthy as in I'm always sort of vaguely fearing the sudden, unexpected visit of a social worker who would step in the doorway, take a look at the filthy living room, and snatch my babies away to foster care filthy. Sure, I want to clean, and sure, I do clean, every single day, but mostly I do other stuff--play with the girls, read books to the girls, do art projects with the girls, grade papers and create lesson plans, sew, read, garden with the girls, eat delicious things, goof around on the internet--you know, stuff.

But part of being committed to an environmental ethic is a commitment to not filth up your living space. How different is filthing up my own house to filthing up highway medians, or the oceans, or the atmosphere? It reflects and teaches my children an irresponsible attitude to one's living environment, and to one's possessions. Although it might not seem so, an environmental ethic should be very concerned with stuff--we should be mindful of our possessions as one of the many aspects of mindful living. We should, obviously, have few things, but those things that we do have should be really important to us. When something is important to us we keep it rather than disposing of it for a new or "better" something, and when something is important to us we take care of it, keeping it nice and in good repair so that we don't have to dispose of it and purchase new stuff.

So this morning I got disgusted with myself and my house and decided to make a change. In the morning, I took "before" photos of one filthy part of my home, and made a vow to straighten it, organize it, and clean it before bedtime. And so I give to you.....my study floor and the things it contains:

• Pizza Express cup
• construction paper
• crayons
• Legos
• miniature bead path
• lid for Tupperware container that's supposed to hold crayons
• two books that show diagrams of the insides of stuff
• paint pens
• collage materials (ie. stuff)
• foam letters and letter cut-outs
• basket that's supposed to hold miniature racecars
• pipe cleaners

• cat
• stickers
• more construction paper
• more crayons
• Sydney's artwork of fingerpainting on construction paper
• wool leftover from Fatty Stegasaurus creation
• fleece blanket leftover from dino quilt creation
• another Tupperware lid, this time for colored pencils
• Ziploc bag of collage materials
• Ziploc bag of stickers
• cloth book of color recognition in French
• Willow's artwork of stickers on construction paper
• book cover separated from book in previous photo
• record bowl
• matching dinosaurs game piece
• more construction paper
• filing box holding computer equipment
• more Legos
• Longman's grammar
• scooter
• dinosaur
• top of a racecar storage box
• stacking tower pieces
• purse for dress-up
• cropped edges trimmed from photos
  
• wrapping paper from purchased hook-and-latch kit
• fleece blanket trimmed from dino quilt
• more construction paper
• miniature race cars
• library books
• My Pretty Pony from my childhood, now Willow's
• romance novels leftover from a freshman comp class project
• bottle of vinegar used for cleaning the glass in soldered pendants

I'm actually surprised to see that hardly any of this filth is actually mine. Hmm. So I worked away at the floor off and on all day, in between reading books and playing with the girls and going to the library for storytime and drawing on construction paper and making it into fans with the girls and telling each other "April Fools" and gardening out in the cold and working out at the YMCA and making dinner and eating dinner, and here's what I finally have:

Glorious. Mind you, the actual floor itself still looks like crap, partly because the previous owners had a really pissy dog or something and also didn't put down tarps when they painted the walls white and partly because the girls and I use the floor as our work surface for all sorts of projects and I'd just rather refinish the thing in ten years than harp at them over spilling paint or glue or being momentarily careless with markers or scissors--I'll get into my manifesto about children's art in today's society some other time.

And here's what happened literally five minutes after I'd finally finished:

Willow's rubber ball bounced under their art cubbies and Matt and the girls began scraping everything out from under the cubbies onto the floor in search of it. Just after this photo was taken, Matt turned to me and said, "You forgot to clean under this," and I replied something that is unprintable and is largely why Willow is able to swear so impressively, although I usually blame that on Matt's dad, a former Navy sailor. But then while I sat across the room and muttered to myself some things about husbands, Matt and the girls picked up all that stuff and put it away, which he certainly wouldn't have bothered to do if the floor had been otherwise covered in stuff, and later when Willow emptied all the crayons out of her big crayon box looking for chalk she put all the crayons back, another thing she definitely wouldn't have done if the floor had been filthy. Thus encouraged, tomorrow I tackle the livingroom table.