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?