If You've Gots the Poison, I've Gots the Remedy

Nothing says first-class parenting like letting your children fall asleep on the couch while your catch up on email. Nothing.

Also first class? Getting into a bicker with your husband over the damn turtle and hey! Guess what! He knew the turtle had an algae problem on his shell and thought I heard him when he muttered about it across the house. Did I mention it's Aaron's birthday? Happy birthday two thousand miles away. Sorry for trying to convince you to let me organize the house. I didn't mean to piss you off.

Did you know freshly-minted six year olds shower? They do. They don't know how to wipe their own ass but they sure as hell prefer a shower over a bath.

Let's talk mops!

Now, I'm the first person to admit I'm a sucker for cleaning supplies. Part of it, I'm sure, is due to the fact that during the majority of my childhood my dad was married at a psychotic Southern Baptist (aka, my stepmonster) who had me fully trained in cleaning everything in the house by the age of eight and she instilled that whole cleanliness-is-godliness bullshit because if you think about? Really? God made a lot of dirt. I mean, if you believe in what she believed God made the earth and made man out of sand and all that stuff so really... how's cleanliness next to godliness?

ANYWAY.

Also? I'm OCD. The children have taken a lot of that away from me, but I dream perfectly white linens and get a wee bit obsessed with stains.

Aaron claims my cleaning obsession is "almost cute" the way I like to try new products (what's not cute about it? the piles of the shit that don't work in the basement because Aaron won't let me throw them away; that's not cute).

Disclaimer: in no way is my house ever clean to my satisfaction. Ever. Don't come by unannounced because I may not let you in because I'm not happy with it. Also, I may not have a bra on.

So, here's what I use around my house no. I'm proud of the way I manage to pare down the amount of stuff I use.

For the small jobs:


The swifter. God, I love this thing. And yes, it's dirty. Because it gets used a lot. I use it for light sweeping and for wet-swiftering when I think the floors need a pick-me-up and need to be a bit more sparkley.

Don't look at me like that. You know sometimes you want your floors to be a bit more sparkley too.

In the kitchen area, I dry swifter daily and wet swifter every few days.

When things get serious around here, I pull this puppy out:


The Bissell Flip-It. Just so you know, if you're not? You should be oooohhhing and aaaaahhhhhing right now.

I asked for this for my birthday a few years ago when Darwin had just discovered that food is sometimes wet and gravity always works. Dude. Toddlers. Seriously.

You can vacuum bare floors with it and when the big stuff is vacuumed up you turn it 180 degrees and WHAMMO, it mops and squeegees the floor dry in one pass.

And (hold on to you hats!) it has different pads for different kinds of floors and it has different cleaning solutions for wood floors and other floods (we have wood floors underneath our carpet, which someday will be exposed so help me Goddess).

Once I got this, I didn't need anything else. Or so I though.

Which brings me back to my scrub-your-house-clean mop...


This, by far, is my favorite type of real-mopping mop. The squeeze action of getting all the nasty water out of the sponge rocks and now with the additionally green bristle things... ::swoon:: the dried sewage covering my basement floors isn't gonna have a chance in hell.

So, that's all I have as far as mops go. Now, if you'd like to discuss dusting cleaner, laundry detergent, bathroom products... woowee, I could chew your ear off about those things, honey.