I have never, ever, ever been able to keep a clean bedroom.  In college I always tried to keep my half of the room neat enough so that my roommate wouldn’t KILL me, and that’s about the best I’ve ever done!

My room is small.  My closet has slanted ceilings because it’s directly under the roof and you can’t even stand up all the way in it.  We don’t have enough space to store clothes, books, etc.  Poor Bobby keeps all his clothes in the basement on shelves because there is not even close to enough room in our bedroom for both of our wardrobes.

So it’s small. And usually the floor is covered with clothes, shoes, and books. And laundry baskets.

Bobby took the entire week off work this week since the kids were going to be on break, and so I’ve been planning for awhile to clean the bedroom this week.  I asked him to remove the kids from the house for a minimum of three hours and he did for over four!

And I cleaned the whole time.  Two baskets of laundry, two bags for goodwill, and three bags of trash later, I am done.  Save for the vaccuming, because for the love of all that’s holy I NEED A LIGHTWEIGHT VACCUM.  Mine is too heavy and despite my groveling with several vaccum-making companies, I’ve never had any luck getting one to review. And GOD FORBID I have to buy my own!! I mean, really, that’s preposterous. Besides I’m saving all my money for a new couch since the children have deee-stroyed ours completely.  But anyhoo. I digress.

I’m 34 years old and I’ve never been able to keep a clean bedroom.  What’s your deal?

(And also, we love hanging out with Tim Gunn.)

One of our favorite Tide products, though, is Tide Stain Release.

I wrote a post about a year and a half ago that involved a crayon, the dryer, and an entire load of laundry – and Tide Stain Release came to the rescue.

Re-reading that post reminded me of something – a little secret about me and Tide Stain Release. For the first… I don’t know… month I used it, I didn’t realize that I was supposed to add it to the washer in addition to detergent. I thought it was more of an “instead of” proposition. Finally one day I happened to actually read the directions and found out otherwise, but it got the clothes so clean I would have never noticed!

My goodness, I am REALLY rambling… let me get to the point of this post!

Tide Stain Release has a great challenge and Sweepstakes coming up on their Facebook page starting March 28th!  You could win a year’s supply of Tide Stain Release or an HE washer and dryer!!!  To help get the challenge kicked off, Jenny took the “get out” challenge and caught it on video for us:

Wasn’t that amazing?  You do NOT want to miss this great challenge! Here’s how you can keep in the loop! First, go “like” Tide’s facebook page. Then, starting March 28th, visit the Tide Stain Release Challenge tab on Tide’s Facebook page and click the “Take the Challenge” button. The first 100,000 registered participants will get a free sample for themselves, as well as three extras to share with Facebook friends, so they too can take the Challenge. Any registrants thereafter will receive a coupon for Tide Stain Release.

- Increase your odds of winning by sharing feedback (good or bad) about Tide Stain Release on the Challenge page, once you’ve tried it. Here, there’s also a chance to have feedback included in a Tide Stain Release advertisement!

- Increase your chances of winning even more by taking a poll about Tide Stain Release on the Challenge page.

We can’t wait for this great challenge to begin, and we’ll have more exciting Tide Stain Release news next month as well. We hope you’ll head over to Tide’s Facebook page to take the chance to “Get Out!”

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We are being compensated for working with Tide on the “Get Out” challenge. All opinions on the product are the real deal!

This morning, my anal-retentive need to be early REALLY paid off!  Because when I picked Jonah up out of his bouncy seat to put him  in his car seat, he had pooped through his clothes up to his shoulders. (My first thought was, well THIS is what I get for daring to take the time to eat breakfast and put on makeup! FOOL!)

Emergency!! Diaper change AND clothes change at the last minute!  Plus I still had to get Sophie in her coat, hat, mittens, etc. Eep!  Fortunately there was a laundry basket with clean clothes unfolded in the dining room (yes! my slacker housekeeping pays off!) so I didn’t have to run upstairs and dig through his drawers for an outfit.

I stripped him, gave his back, shoulders, and nether-regions a baby wipes bath, and got him changed and dressed.  Then popped him in his car seat and got Sophie ready to go.

We were in the car by 9:14.

Shew! {wipes forehead}.

Oh, crap. (Pun intended.) I just remembered I still have his poop-covered clothes sitting out!  Yikes!  Umm…gotta go!

Soph and I were sitting in the living room shortly after noon when she decided to go upstairs. I figured she was headed up to her room to play with her dollhouse or read books and didn’t think a thing of it.  But then about two minutes later I heard her yelling, “OH no! It’s TOO WET!”

Crap.  That can’t be good.

I raced upstairs and found Sophie standing in front of the toilet with her pants and panties pulled down. “It’s TOO WET!” she said again?  ”What’s too wet?” I said. “Did you go pee pee in your pants?”

“No it’s too wet on your (she’s still got pronoun confusion) SHIRT.”  She replied.

I moved in to investigate.  Her pants and panties were dry, but she was wearing a long tunic-style shirt, and sure enough there was a small water spot on the back.  It was oddly round, and about the diameter of a soup can.

I put her on the potty just in case, and noted that her lady parts were also dry.  There was no toilet paper anywhere and it didn’t look like she’d gone potty yet.  She told me she DID need to go pee pee and as she sat on the the pot, I began my interrogation.

“Did you already go pee pee?”

“No.”

“Do you need to go?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get wet from? The sink or the potty?”

“The potty!”

And yet. There was no water splashed anywhere on the floor, her hands were dry, there was no water on the toilet seat.

She sat there a couple minutes but never did pee.  And I never could figure out how she got wet!  So we just changed her shirt and moved on.  But dangit if I wouldn’t like to know.  I was so curious I even SMELLED the shirt.  (I’m an ace sleuth after all.)  It didn’t really smell like pee.  Maybe there was just a little water on the bathroom floor?  I don’t know! The rest of that kiddo was bone dry!

So, Nancy and friends, where did the “mysterious wet” come from?

It was baaaaaaad.  Navy blue puke everywhere.  On Sophie, for one, and in her beautiful hair, all over her PJ’s, her Dora sheets and pillow, her Eeyore blanket, and even some of her doll clothes for her Angelina Ballerina doll. (Not to mention the carpet, which my amazing husband steam-cleaned in the middle of the night AFTER we bathed Sophie.)

The Soph continued to spew blue (not the cupcake’s fault, I would like to say, she just got a bug somewhere) every 20-30 minutes for the next few hours.  Finally about four in the morning she was blued-out and nothing was left and then we got the neon-yellow bile.  She threw up continuously until 9 am, then things slowed down, but we still had several more incidents until 12:45 pm.  I would estimate she threw up about 20 times during that period. Poor Sophie, who until this had thrown up probably only 3 or 4 times in her entire life, was totally confused and traumatized!

So, like I said.  6th load of laundry in.  And I have at LEAST one more to go!  Including the jeans I am wearing.  (Hey, I have like, two pairs of maternity pants that fit!  I am desperate! Quick setting, quick setting!) We were completely out of clean towels by 7 am.  Did I mention how much I love the “quick” setting on my Frigidaire washer & dryer??

Pretty much all my favorite settings have applied throughout this day, especially Stain Clean and Sanitize! And since I have been awake now for oh…over 15 hours, I am very thankful that my Affinity dynamic duo are so easy to operate.  I haven’t managed to screw up any of said loads…and I am a walking zombie, or in this case, a “mombie” (as my friend Cherry likes to say.)  And the blue?  Is gone!  All of our laundry is blue-cupcake free.

So, I’ve been telling you about these great appliances for months now, and I think fate saw it fitting to give me something really EPIC to talk about for my GRANDE FINALE post!!  Ah, well.  Good enough.  The appliances were worth it!

And do you think it’s a coincidence that they are BLUE??

Blue looks GOOD on these machines!

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This post was written as part of my involvement with Mom Central Consulting in the Frigidaire Test Drive Mom team. Frigidaire gave me an Affinity Washer and Dryer and I reviewed the heck out of them, and loved every minute of it!

Because we were in a super top-secret environment , we weren’t allowed to take pictures. SO you will have to settle for my brilliant word-pictures and this picture of me taken tonight after I got home from Target where I went specifically to purchase a bottle of Tide Coldwater Free HE!

You’re welcome. Yes, that’s right, I drank the kool-aid. I am really excited about saving energy by using Tide Coldwater and washing my stuff in cold rather than warm water. Because did you know that 80% of the energy used in doing laundry comes from heating the water?? ‘Tis TRUE! I’ve been wanting to make the leap to cold water washing for awhile, but I was too skeeered.  However, the good scientists at P&G convinced me that Tide Coldwater works!  So the leap has been made!

One thing about the good scientists at P&G – they are all REALLY EXCITED about inventing better ways to get our clothes clean. My favorite researcher was named Elaine.  She led several of the presentations and a tour of one of their labs that contained about 15 bazillion washing machines where they duplicate water quality from all over the world and figure out how to make the best detergents to get everyone’s clothes clean.  Elaine was SO enthusiastic and excited about her job.  It was awesome!  She was totally geeked out about fabric care innovation in a way that made us all geeked out too!  I LOVED her. I want her to come over and talk laundry with me over coffee.

One of the many eye-opening things that Elaine told us is that our bodies make 50 grams of soil a day.  That’s a handful of dirt coming off of ourselves A DAY!!!!!!!  I think I speak for everyone in the Fabric Care University when I saw “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWW!”  No wonder our clothes are so dirty!! And I won’t even go into the diagram they showed us that specified where all that body soil comes from. ICK. Just trust me, we are all dirty, dirty, dirty people.  And we get our clothes dirty!! And we need good fabric care!!

The other super-eye-opening thing I learned at Fabric Care University was all about how the different types of washers work.  I just got my new high-efficiency washer from Frigidaire (which I’ll be posting about next week, ohmygoodnessitissoooawesome) last week, so I was ALL EARS to learn about how HE’s work.  It was really cool to learn (I’ll share more of what I learned next week) and also to hear about how P&G works with washing machine manufacturer’s to make their detergents more effective.

As I mentioned, some of what we discussed was super-top-secret.  But I CAN tell you that Tide and Downy have some really exciting innovations coming up really soon.  They got ME excited about them and I know you’ll think they are really cool too.

Fabric Care University was amazing and really reinforced my Tide brand-loyalty.  I am excited to take the cold water plunge with Tide Coldwater and my new HE washer from Frigidaire and see how much water and energy I can save while still getting my laundry clean clean clean.  I will let you know how it goes!

Thanks so much to the great folks at P&G Fabric Care for putting on an amazing event and the hard-working team at DeVries PR who took such good care to make sure everything went smoothly.  I was so privilged to be a part of this event!

Anycrap! I am about to give you a cleaning tool recommendation.  Which is ironic, no?  But it’s a GOOD ONE!

A few weeks ago I received an email from My Blog Spark on behalf of P&G asking if I’d like to review the Swiffer Sweeper Vac, and I was SOOOOOO EXCITED.  I’m not kidding, I was totally geeked out!! Because I have been a dedicated user of Swiffer products for years – they are one of those cleaning tools that make it easy for me.  And I had been jonesing for a Sweeper Vac for a long time, but wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend the $$.  Because what if it wasn’t as wonderful as it seemed?

It. Is. WONDERFUL!  It is all that and more.  It is the Starbucks of stick vacs.  Get one of these babies and you will NOT be disappointed!

When my Sweeper Vac arrived, it also came with a little “kit” to show me how well it worked.  It had stuff for me to dump on my floor and vacuum up, like little containers of Cheerios and even HAIR!

I totally cracked up.

Truuuust me, I don’t need them to send me stuff to sprinkle on my floor.  I got STUFF on my floor! Cheerios, cracker crumbs, and especially pine needles, courtesy of these two old ladies in my front yard:

Thanks to these pine trees, my hard wood floors are constantly covered with pine needles.  Especially after a week like this one, which has been super rainy.  Pine needles everywhere.

Argh!

Happily, the Swiffer Sweeper Vac is GREAT at picking up pine needles!  And Cheerios, cracker crumbs, pet hair, and dirt in general.  I big puffy heart it, and I don’t know what I’ve ever done without it.  The Swiffer dry cloth cleans up all kinds of dirt, and the Vac sucks up all the crumbs of my life.  It rocks!  My favorite, favorite, favorite thing about it is that the BATTERY lasts!  I held off publishing this review for a month or so because I wanted to give the battery a good test.  After using it several times a week, (true story!) I’ve never had the battery even come close to running out (which is a problem I’ve had with past machines I’ve tried.)  My living and dining rooms are pretty good-sized and I also use it on my new fabulous kitchen floor, and I’ve always had more than enough battery to do all three rooms thoroughly.  Woohoo!

Ok, so, now for the really fun part.   P&G not only gave me a Swiffer Sweeper Vac to keep, they also gave me a $40 gift card to give to one of you so you can get your own Sweeper Vac of Dreams (as I like to call it.)  Here’s how to enter!

1) Leave me a comment on this post telling me what room in your house you most hate to clean.

2) For an extra entry, tweet about this giveaway on twitter and leave me a link to your twitter URL.

3) For another extra entry, share about this entry on Facebook and leave me a comment letting me know you did so.

Entries will close and Random.org will pick a winner on Monday, May 20th at11:59 pm.

Good luck and happy Swiffering!

I was getting my bowling groove on when all of a sudden Sophie began to fuss. “Need help! Need HELP!” she cried frantically. I turned to look at her and she had her hand extended toward me, covered in peanut butter. Neither of my kids like it when their hands get messy while they’re eating so I am used to having to wipe her hands before she can finish her meal. But as I walked toward her to grab a napkin, I realized: She’s not eating peanut butter. That can’t be peanut butter.

I took hold of her wrist and got a whiff and panicked. THAT’S NOT PEANUT BUTTER!

It was poop.

She had a chicken nugget in one hand, and a bunch of poop in the other.

I immediately did what I could with a napkin, then began jumping around screaming “NO touch! No touch!” while frantically trying to locate the wipes and wrestle the Wii controller that was strapped to me off of my arm. (I am very good in a panic situation. {Sarcasm sign!})

I found the wipes, got her hand cleaned up, washed it in soap and scalding water (just kidding, it was just really warm), managed not to VOMIT, and then went about changing her diaper. I quickly discovered that she’d had a bit of a blowout, and feeling poop on her lower back, had reached back to find out what the heck was going on back there. And found out. Eeeeeww.

I made it almost six years as a mother without having a kid stick his or her hand in their own poo, I guess that is pretty good. But YUCK. It was disgusting.

And it is time for Camp Potty to begin TODAY!

Sam’s 21 months old now, and he’s very excited about the prospect of going in the potty. Not that he’s actually done it or anything, but it sure looks fun when Elmo does it. We’ve put him on the potty a few times to no avail, but that’s about as far as we’ve gotten.

This afternoon we all went out to play in the snow (I will post pictures of Sam dressed in a blanket sleeper, two pairs of his dad’s socks – his boots won’t fit anymore – and Kate’s old purple jacket and pink hat with pom poms as soon as I get them uploaded. Oh and he also had pink socks on his hands because I couldn’t find his gloves). In any case, when we got back in, he looked at me and said “poopy!” I said “Did you poop?” and he said no, but said yes when I asked him if he needed to. He said “Let’s go!” and off to the potty we ran. Again, nothing happened, but I had the bright idea to leave his diaper off for a while. I put some Baby Legs on him and let him run free.

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, we tried the potty thing off and on, but he didn’t do anything. He hadn’t had any accidents either, so I thought he would surely have to do something soon. I wanted to give it one last try before putting him to bed, so I sat him on the potty and let him read “Elmo Goes Potty” for a while. As he was enjoying his reading time, I took his Baby Legs off since I was going to put him in his jammies. At that point, I realized the Baby Legs were wet. I had cleaned up (what I thought was) juice he spilled a little bit earlier, and I couldn’t tell if what was on them was juice or pee. (The sniff test was inconclusive, if you can believe that.) So I decided to ask him.

Me: Sammy, what is on your socks?
Sammy: Juice!
Me: Is it juice or pee pee?
Sammy: Pee pee!
Me: Did you pee pee on your socks?
Sammy: No! Juice!
Me: So is this juice or pee pee?
Sammy: Pee pee.
Me: Where is the rest of the pee pee?
Sammy: Socks.
Me: I know this is on your socks, but where is the rest? Where did you pee pee?
Sammy: In Daddy’s room.
Me: You pee peed in Daddy’s room?
Sammy: No. Pee pee in the potty.
Me: No, you didn’t pee pee in the potty. Can you show me where the pee pee is?
Sammy: Daddy’s room!

So we went to Daddy’s room (which incidentally is also my room). I looked at the carpet critically, but didn’t see anything. As I looked around the bathroom floor in our room, it occurred to me that I was searching my house for a pool of pee. Never thought I’d do that, but disturbingly it seemed perfectly normal. I guess I am officially fully entrenched in parenthood.

Eventually I found what I was looking for – on the floor next to Sammy’s chair at the kitchen table. The chair on which he likes to stand. Next to the table on which I had earlier cleaned up “spilled juice.”

Can someone pass the Lysol wipes?

THIS my friends, is where that VERY FLAWED logic got me:

Please note my favorite part of this photo: Sophie’s hair matted with chocolate and stuck to her chin like a BEARD.

The nice people at Tim Horton’s gave me FRESH donuts. As in fresh, dripping with chocolate icing that had not yet had time to harden. And of course, having promised the Soph a donut, it’s not like I could withhold it!

So, the second place this flawed logic and my own dumbness got me, was the parking lot of Kroger with a child covered in chocolate icing and NO WIPES! Because really, I DO have to earn my “Mother of the Year” badge somehow!

I REALLY had to get some groceries for a little shindig I was having, so I could not turn around and go home to clean my child up. Out of desperation, I left Soph in the car, dashed in the entrance of Kroger, and grabbed about 40 kajillion of those clorox wipes they have out for you to clean your cart with.

That’s right! I scrubbed my toddler’s face and hands clean with CLOROX wipes!! Again, I should definitely be up for some fabulous award. She was NONE too pleased with the situation. And as the clorox wipes couldn’t break up the layers of hair matted with chocolate icing, I had to throw her in the bathtub and scrub it out when we got home.

But at least she didn’t look like a mini “Bearded Lady” going through Kroger!

*Sheesh*. The chocolate dip donut was a bad choice. Next time I’m gettin’ the TimBits!