Green Works

You all know me and my weirdo hippy amish ideas about cleaning and just life in general. I really do try to stay away from all the icky chemicals when it comes to household cleaning. I've had to make a few concessions along the way, mainly because we have hard (HARD) water and nothing bug Cascade will clean my dishes. In general, though, I lend toward natural stuffs - we use a lot of vinegar and baking soda.

This weekend I bought some of this stuff. Usually I buy cleaning products from Vitacost but we had just placed an order for vitamins and I didn't feel like paying shipping for toilet cleaner. I had heard about the supposedly "green" products from Clorox and it just seemed a little hypocritical that "Clorox" and "green" should be mentioned in the same sentence. However, they are readily available here in BF Nowhere, Ohio. And, there is something to be said about a company completely saturated in known carcinogens at least attempting to make products that aren't going to kill us all. So I gave it a whirl and got some of the all purpose cleaner and the toilet stuff.

So far so good, it works well, smells nice and doesn't contain anything horrible. Or at least nothing horrible that they're divulging on the label.

In completely unrelated news, I'm going to attempt to make the kids advent calendars this year. I've racked my brain trying to come up with something of manageable size that will fit four peppermints or chocolates in each pocket but I've got nothin'. Plus, I think it would be a neat thing for them to pass on to their children if they each had one of their own. I think I'll let them pick the pattern themselves, but with some guidance. As in "You can either make yours a stocking or a snowman" that way I won't end up with advent calendars shaped like a fire truck or a chicken.

Trick or Treat?

I finished the monkey, so there! Isn't he cute? And check out my little Witchlings! No one "got" the theme we had going on. Maybe if Owen had cooperated and dressed up like a Winkie Guard instead of this....whatever this is...super scary skeleon man, I guess. Anyway, I took about 400 pictures on my parents' front porch and this was the best I could get. This Halloween was just plain insane. Each year I think maybe it can't get crazier, but it always does.

Those of you who know Bodie know he's a man of few words. He really only talks about things that are important to him. He added another phrase to his repetoire: "treat-treat". And he perfected "thank you" and "bye" while he was at it. It took him one house to catch on to the idea that this whole dressing up like a goof and knocking on stranger's door equaled candy. And it took him just a few minutes to discover that if you chew a small hole in the corner of a Hershey bar wrapper, and then squeeze the bar in your hands, you can actually suck the chocolate through the hole.

You thought I was kidding about the brain for dinner, didn't you. Well, it's true. And here's picture to prove it. The really funny part is that I managed to actually convince Owen that I had slain a monster, cooked its brain for dinner, cooked some bats (bowtie pasta) in its guts, and floated its eyeballs in a dish. Seriously. Funniest. Thing. Ever.

Have I mentioned Maggie really loves her cat? But what Witch doesn't love her cat, right?