Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Kids Are Gross (Recipe!)

Hey, come closer. I wanna tell you a secret.....

Kids are gross. Boy kids especially.


I know girls can do anything boys can do, including being disgusting. My sweet MIL not only watched all the precious little Lees while Hubs and I left the country and were trying to remember such things as, "hey, what was that last drink I had because I want another one of those," and "do you think it's time to put more sunscreen on?", but she also did it over Easter. She made sure the door was unlocked for the Easter Bunny, and then she had a party for everyone that was not us, at our house.

She is the cool grandma.

After life got back to normal and the guilt sunk in that we went on Spring Break without the kids and without doing the Spring cleaning first, I decided to maybe bust the carpet cleaner out and scrub the sofa in the TV room*. That is to say, Holy Mother of God I am so sorry to everyone who came to my dirty-ass house for Easter. It's a good thing Jesus forgives me, but I'm not sure you guys should.

*Also Hubs thinks it is hawwwwt when I clean and I do what I can to keep the romance alive.

This is a process that is undertaken in steps, never cleaning more seats than would leave still dry the right number of seats for current asses in the house because math. Eventually though, everything gets a turn.

I started with the ottoman because for some reason that piece catches the brunt of everything. But before I started in on the other sections, I sauntered into the front room, that living room that if you were just walking by the house, or rang our doorbell to try to sell us newspapers or books because otherwise your host family will send you back to Estonia, you would think that in a normal home this might be the "nice living room", or the "sitting room". The one where kids aren't allowed and it's just for grownups.

Not in this house.

Here is our "front living room" under normal, routine usage:


It's also the site of all pillow/blanket forts, most Nerf wars, silent reading, not silent fart contests, and the parking lot for ToddlerBandit's entire fleet of vehicles.

The couch came with the house, and is in pretty good shape, except for when my kids do what-in-the-everloving-Hell it is that they do to make it look like this:




Srsly. WTF is happening here?
So I cleaned it. With this recipe:


Vinegar
Dawn dish soap
Downy fabric softener
Peroxide
Enough hot water to dissolve things so a spray bottle wouldn't clog

I filled a spray bottle with part of this and the cleaning solution bottle of my carpet shampooer with the rest.

Oh, you wanted measurements? Sorry.

  • Not too much Dawn or you'll never rinse it out.
  • Just enough Downy that the fabric isn't stiff when you're done.
  • Everything else is dependent on how much I have left, for example Clayton biffed it in the canyon Sunday and I used up some of the peroxide cleaning the gashing wounds on his face, so I used part of what was left, leaving some for later.

You know....eyeball it. Doesn't everyone cook that way? Hmmmm. Maybe why this isn't normally a cooking blog.

Moving on.

I sprayed the entire cushions from the spray bottle, the stainiest parts in particular. Then I shampooed with the upholstery attachment on the high traffic setting, then ran just water over it twice. And sucked. And sucked. Aaaaaand sucked.

Then I dumped out the collection basin in the sink and threw up until I was dead because ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

And now they look like this:



And now nobody is allowed to sit on them ever again in their lives or I will kill them.

Just kidding.

I have done the alcohol thing before because it's supposed to dry faster or whatever because you're not using water but I wasn't as impressed with that to be honest. Maybe it's just because there's no clean like the clean that is dumping out a bucket of mud when you're done. I should have just drank the alcohol at a measurement consistent with however much is necessary to not give a shit how dirty your couch is.

I would never trade our gross weird kids (or other peoples' kids who add to the stew) for a clean house, but it's nice to have like five minutes of booger-free surroundings once in a while.

What's your secret go-to cleaning solution?

Monday, May 8, 2017

Trippy

Remember that time I freed up all the space for pictures before our trip?


We need to talk about that.


First off, it was amazing. All of it. No parts of it sucked.


We took this camera bag/backpack that has our camera and video camera all through seventy million airports and customs and whatnot and took exactly eleven less pictures than we did when we went to Jamaica.


That is to say: Zero.


In Jamaica the camera glitched eleven pictures into our vacation. This time, I don't know, I guess we were just too lazy.


Lucky for you, who follow me here or other places, I'm not one of those annoying people who posts every picture of everything on my vacation. No. This vacation? I took five on my phone. I thought I took four but I was scrolling through my phone yesterday and found an extra. Are you ready?




Idaho Potato. We travelled a bajillion miles to eat a tuber from the Gem State. That is all.





My view just about every single day. I am an expert at doing nothing. My consulting services are available. Call for prices.
 

Hubs was being annoying and made me take his picture. That drink is called an Avalanche, and is blended margarita mix in a beer. I thought they were disgusting but it's a good way to keep your beer cold.


Random poster in a restaurant that had the word "Clayton" on it, so I snapped this and texted it to him at probably 3am or something. He didn't respond. :( It also says "Seamen" but he was too young to get the joke until this week when they had the talk/video at school.


I found this in my phone yesterday and literally had no recollection of having taken it. For a minute I didn't even know who it was. I asked Hubs about it. He said "Yeah. That was the day we got super drunk and I showed you how to use your Snapchat," which totally makes sense now. I am including it mainly for the pleasure of my in-laws who claim to "never have seen me drunk," and who say they "would like to see what that looks like". Apparently this is what that looks like. Also I still don't know how to use Snapchat.

Luckily there is this thing called the internet where you can find actual pictures of the things we saw and did because TBH Barbados is a really small island and the stuff that's there isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Also our travel mate took a shit ton of pictures of every damn thing, so let me know what particular thing you would like to see such as a tree or a flower or a bird or a piece of sand, and I will have her locate it in her photography index.

Here are some things we saw:



The Cornwallis shipwreck in Carlisle Bay. Our guide tried to tell us this was from Pirates of the Caribbean, but it was actually a Canadian ship that got torpedoed by a German U-Boat in WWII. The above-water view looked like this:




If you know me, you know snorkeling was a HUUUUUGE deal for me. I pretended that I wasn't scared to death but to be honest it was probably the three liquor-laden coffees I had in the morning before we left that allowed me to do it without losing my shit. The minute I hit the water someone yelled gleefully, "Oh loooooook! There's a SHARK!"


FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.


I have never been so thankful that my stupid uterus took a brief break from sapping me of all my iron deposits in my life.


But don't worry. That shark? It turned out to only be a barracuda.


FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.


Other than that my mask kept fogging up on me and the strap on my vest kept brushing up against my leg and freaking me out, I had a good time. Everyone really just wanted to see these guys:




Turtles. That they kept telling everyone not to touch but I was like, "no shit. I'm not touching that thing. And that thing also better not touch me."


We saw the Coast Guard ship, and it didn't make me feel better about their rescue abilities, because the ship looked like this:




#trustyRusty


And the crew looked like this:






Which made complete sense after we met the local cops and found out they pretty much just work drunk all day can have two drinks per shift and would like you to make that happen please and thank you.




We also saw a Sea Horse like this:




But he was probably just training for all the water on the track at this year's Kentucky Derby, now that I think of it.


We drank a LOT and ate a lot of great food including sushi almost every night. Hubs got in a little kerfuffle with the host at the Japanese restaurant over our reservations, which were under our name, and he was disappointed that we were not Asian, then acted like he thought we were stealing someone else's spot.


We weren't. Calm down. We get that a lot.


Overall, it was a fantastic trip. We missed the kids, but we were able to facetime them everyday before doing crazy things like laying in bed and watching Willy Wonka and an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie marathon.

I can't wait to do it again.