Homemade Dusting Cleaner

 

Hello everyone! Just wanted to share a quick cleaning tip with you that I have recently discovered.

It turns out that tea tree oil works really well for dusting! I normally don’t use Pledge when I dust because we have hard wood floors and no matter how carefully I spray, it always ends up on the floor. Since we have 3 crazy kids running around the house all day, the last thing we need is slippery floors. But I do really like the shine you get when you polish wood furniture.

Then my chiropractor told me that I could use tea tree oil to dust! All you do is dilute 1 tablespoon of tea tree oil in a 12 or 16 oz spray bottle of water. I sprayed my oil/water mixture onto my dusting mitt (I have a Norwex dusting mitt that I absolutely love. It really grabs all of the dust instead of just moving it around) and then got to dusting!

Now this picture is a little embarrassing because we hadn’t dusted in awhile. But in the interest of showing you just how well the tea tree oil works…

Look at that shine! Bonus: tea tree oil kills dust mites. But the best part for me was when I cleaned my kitchen table (which is on hard wood): none of the cleaner ended up on the floor.

Tea tree oil also kills mold, so you can take this same spray bottle into the bathroom to clean up. I’ve also used it to treat dandruff, and it worked wonders! There are actually a bunch of uses for this awesome stuff. If you are into natural cleaning and natural remedies, you should do some Googling and read up on tea tree oil.

I hope you all have a wonderful day!

For When the Baby Poops on the Carpet

Baby Ary has this habit of taking her diaper off the second I put it on. I suppose she just prefers to run through life naked as a jay bird. However, she’s not potty trained nor is she ready to be potty trained, so I must insist that she wears a diaper. She can run around in just the diaper (which she does every day, no matter if it’s snowing outside), but she must wear the diaper. I know–I’m such a mean mom. There’s no reasoning with this kid though, so I have to duct tape her diaper every single time I change it.

We had oatmeal this morning and Ary made an exceptional mess with it. It was all over her hair (even in the back!), all over her bib and her shirt (what’s the point of the bib, again?), and all over the outside of her diaper. I tried spot cleaning her hair, but it was too far gone; she needed a bath. I didn’t want to let her rub her oatmeal diaper all over the stairs though, and I was not going to carry her and get it all over myself, so I decided the best option was to change her quickly. I didn’t want to waste a diaper by ducting taping it shut because, what are the odds that she’d pee in the next 5 minutes? But then of course, I had to use the restroom. She was very focused on JoJo’s Circus, so I stole away to the bathroom quickly. From the toilet I heard the tell-tale riiiip of the velcro tab coming off of the diaper. I wash my hands and run out to find Ary standing in her own poop with the diaper swung around her shoulder like a bandelier. When she saw me she tried to run behind the couch to hide, but I caught her after she took one step.

Then I stood there holding her above the ground so she couldn’t do anymore damage with her poop feet, wondering what the heck I was supposed to do next. There really should be a, “Policies and Procedures for Baby Pooping on Carpet” class that they make you take in high school. It would have been much more useful than the Geometry class that I barely got through only to never use geometry in my life ever again. After 30 seconds of running through my options in my panicked mind, I decided it would be best to throw her in the bath and deal with the poopy carpet afterwards.

Thankfully, I was able to get all the toys out of the tub before she contaminated them, eliminating those from my disinfect list. After I got her cleaned up and in a fresh DUCT TAPED diaper, I set her and her sister up in their playroom with Disney Jr. and went to battle with the poop on the white living room carpet.

I thought I would share with you all how I managed to get nasty, dark poop out of the white carpet, in case you have/ end up with a Baby Ary of your own.

Here’s the before picture:

Obviously, remove the clumped piles of poop first. Thankfully, we always have disposable gloves in the house for such a day as this. Then I used my secret weapon: hydrogen peroxide. This $.80 bottle kills germs and removes stains and is safe to use on colors. I don’t like using bleach because it’s such a harsh chemical, and I’ve ruined too many clothing items by leaning on a kitchen counter after having cleaned it with bleach. I prefer using stuff like hydrogen peroxide, vinegar, baking soda, and salt to clean.

Anyways, so after you remove the poop, apply hydrogen peroxide to the stain (or stains in my case). Let it sit for 5 minutes, and then pat it down with paper towels until you’ve got most of the peroxide up. Re-apply the peroxide and go through the same process. Repeat this process until the stain is gone. After 4 treatments, my carpet looked like this:

I probably could have left well enough alone at this point, because the peroxide really did a good job of getting the stain up. But I wanted to be safe, so I pulled out our carpet shampoo system and gave the carpet a good cleaning with a pet odor carpet shampoo (because we occasionally have that problem as well). This is what the carpet looked like after the shampoo:

So there you have it–when you’re baby poops on the carpet, break out the hydrogen peroxide and no one will ever know!

 

P.S. Hydrogen peroxide is also good as a spot treatment on laundry if you’re ever in a pinch (although I do prefer gel Oxyclean).