A Quiet Medicine Cabinet

One evening while I was brushing my teeth, I was staring into the open medicine cabinet and I caught my eyes unconsciously reading over the labels on the bottles. Instead of being in the moment, relaxing my mind before bed, or thinking of something useful, my mind was absently eating up all the words on the labels. 

Everything looked chaotic & busy, with flashy colours and letters. 

So I picked up the bottle of contact solution and peeled off the label. It came off easily and left no sticky residue behind. Then I did it to every other container with a label that would peel off. 

I already know how to apply deoderant and I'll never have any clue what any of those strange ingredients are anyways, so the labels are of no use to me anyways. Now when I open my medicine cabinet, I'm not mindlessly consuming clever brand names, slogans, logos, and warnings. I just see what I need to see, quiet shelves of different coloured and shaped bottles. 

Home Remedies: Stains

I could tell you that living with 2 males means that I have to have a good strategy for coping with stains, but the truth is, I'm just as bad for getting my clothes stained as them! In some cases even more so because I'm not the tidiest cook (and have yet to make myself an apron) and I'm usually doing most of the cooking. So anyways, a couple years ago Mason and Gavin bought me a really nice shirt for Mother's Day and not long after I found a couple of grease spots on it. It was an expensive shirt and I was not happy to find stains on it, so I went on a mission to find a good solution. I don't remember where I found it, but this has been my go-to stain removing solution ever since. I've even gotten lots of other non-greasy stains out this way, it just works so well. I've only ever used it on cotton/cotton blends, but it should be gentle enough to use on all washable fabrics.


What you need:

baking soda
dish soap (that you would hand wash dishes with)

How to do it:

-Get the stained area damp.
-Pour on some dish soap.
-Dump on some baking powder.
-Mix with your finger until it becomes a thick paste (add more soap or soda to get it right if necessary).
-Rub the spot with the mixture with your fingers.
-Rinse from the backside of the shirt with water (warm to hot water for grease stains, cold water for coloured stains).
-Check to see if it got rid of the stain all the way.
         -If it did (or you can't tell), hang the shirt to dry.
          Never put clothes that may have stains in the dryer!
         -If it didn't, repeat. This time allow the mixture to sit on there for a while before
          scrubbing and rinsing it out.

Squeaky Clean

Good morning!

As you may or may not know, I am back at home visiting with family right now. In an attempt to make my life easier without abandoning the blog again, I have been feverishly preparing posts ahead of time and scheduling them for later dates! I thought of posting about this a while ago and just remembered now (Yay!). I'm sure that there are plenty of moms out there who think about what cleaning products they use around their children. There are also lots of other people who worry about themselves or the environment, too, I suppose. Some products, such as Vim, work well, but make you feel ill or a little woozy after cleaning the bathroom. That is clearly a testament to how toxic they are! Now imagine a little person breathing that in. :-S 

I found this awesome recipe for a cleaning product that you can make yourself in a book my mom gave me called Homemade. It's published by Reader's Digest in Canada and it has over 350 pages of recipes for food, cleaning products, beauty products and other miscellaneous stuff that is better for you, the environment and your wallet than the versions of these things sold in stores.

Citrus Vinegar

(adapted from Homemade's Citrus Disinfectant)

Supplies:

1 Peel from a citrus fruit of your choosing

1 clean, large jar 

White vinegar

1 clean 1 L (32 oz) spray bottle

Directions:

Place citrus peel in jar and fill with vinegar. Store in a cupboard for two weeks. Once the two weeks is up, strain the vinegar and place in spray bottle. I only dilute it a little, but you can dilute it a lot more if you like. The book suggests 1 cup citrus vinegar per 1L spray bottle, the rest would be water.