Thanksgiving is my holiday. The first meal I learned how to cook was a seven course turkey dinner (when I hit home economics in the 6th grade and we made pizza…on bagels…in the microwave I was underwhelmed) and it’s the psychotic stress-crazy-insanity bringing holiday in my family of origin’s house. While weddings can bring on Greek tragedy levels of psychosis in any family, Thanksgiving was the holiday that made all of the quirks of my extended family really shine. Truly, you can not understand how important Thanksgiving was in my family until you realize that the patriarch my my Mom’s family was not only viciously verbally abusive, but a professional chief who started a culinary school. Even after he died, the level of passion and dedication the women in my family threw at the holiday was both terrifying and addictive, and the whole point was to cook for two days strait while driving yourself (and anyone handy) insane, then have a dinner so delicious that heaven itself wept.

This was the holiday where, as a woman, you were judged by the entire family. Eight year olds would snark you if the food wasn’t up to par, and there was endless praise thrown down upon the heads of those who brought the delicious.

The thing that sucked about Thanksgiving, though, was that this was fueled by the fun that the menfolk would sit around and watch the Macy’s Parade or football with the kids (I used to think this was unfair when I was old enough to be drafted into slave labor help in the kitchen, but now I realize that it was a great way to not only get the kids, but the men, out from underfoot), and followed by an enormous stack of dishes to wash when everyone was sitting on whatever soft surface they could find, stoned on turkey.

No more, my friends and loyal readers. I am going to give you my new, improved, Thanksgiving schedule. I’ve been working on this all year, with little nudges and changes here and there. Here is the plan: every day this week, when you make dinner, you’ll make an extra dish. This should take no longer than 20-30 minutes. You can finish part of it and have it as a side for dinner that night, or toss it in the fridge or freezer and wait for T-day.

And when Thanksgiving comes, dear reader, you will be that calm, cool, collected Martha Steward-esq woman all your friends will hate as you lay dish after delicious, from-scratch cooked, home made dish on the table, without having to face a hideous pile of cooking dishes and not getting to spend time with your guests on Thanksgiving.

My recipes tend to be pretty…generous (they are delicious with a wide range of input), so I’ve included some of my recipes and some recipes from other sources. The things for my recipes will be in loose measure- make as much as you need (potatoes, carrots, and onions fit this bill). The recipes I’ve culled from other sources will have specific units of measurement, so you’ll be able to tell what they are just by the shopping list.

Here is the shopping list and list of dishes for this plan.

• Carrots   (one large bunch)
• Potatoes (large bag)
• Onions (large bag)
• Garlic (5-6 heads)
• Celery (1 bunch)
• Bread: 3 different kinds, on sale if you can get it- white/french baugette, pumpernickle, and cornbread.
• 1 can of water chestnuts
• 1 package of dried currants
• Dried Parsley
• Dried Sage
• Turkey, large enough to feed everyone and provide leftovers
• Flour, yeast (in a jar, not in packages), salt.
• 2 lbs(packages of 4 sticks) of butter. No margarine. We’re cooking from scratch, and you don’t do that and throw margarine in the mix.
• 1 large can of Crisco or lard/vegitable shortening
• Brown sugar
• Regular sugar
• Frozen cranberries OR canned cranberry jelly
• Canned, frozen, or fresh corn (whatever you like best/is cheapest)
• Sweet potatoes- they should be orange in the middle. Sometimes they are called yams. If they are white in the middle… oh well, the recipie will still taste good.
• Walnuts or pecans
• Buttermilk (large container)
• Heavy Whipping Cream (large container)
• Sherry (not the cheapest stuff, you can use cooking sherry if you have it on hand or an OK $8 bottle)
• I will add to this list as I finish adding and refining all the recipies.

I keep passive agressively non nagging gently reminding hubs to do things that will help make our blankets last longer, and he keeps ignoring me. Thus, his favorite blanket is starting to get ratty. It’s a pretty blanket and we got it on some ridiculous clearance price. When we were out shopping today we stopped and looked at what it would cost to replace it with much less nice blankets at Target, and boy was he in for some sticker shock.

I think we spent $20 on our king sized blanket, which is black and white with a beautiful scrolling victorian-esque pattern on it. It’s origional price was somewhere over $100. The crappy polyester blankets with cheap fiber fill in ugly colors were twice what we paid for the blanket we’re using right now.

There are things you can do to make your blankets last a lot longer.

1. Use sheets. Always, always, use sheets. Sheets are there to keep your blanket safe from you, and the oils your skin makes when you sweat at night, which get ground in. That’s what really gets things dirty. If you use sheets, you don’t have to wash the blankets nearly as often, and sheets are much easier, faster, and cheaper to launder and replace.
2. Wash in as cold water as you can take. If you wash the linens on my neurotic a schedule, (don’t laugh at me, I don’t know where my notion that I must change my linens on Monday comes from) regularly it’s not as much of an issue, but try to get to it when you can still get away with “warm” and well before you have to use hot water.
3. Use the oxygen bleaches instead of chlorine bleach. It’s a lot easier on the fabric. No bleach is easiest at all, but I don’t like not having my linens go through some sort of autoclave chemical sanitation.
4. If you can, use a spin dryer to get as much excess water out before you put it in the dryer, where the heat and the tumbling will damage the fibers and age the blanket more than anything else your are doing with it, including putting it directly against your oily, dirty flesh for hours at a time and farting through it.
5. Stop ripping it off me when I’m nicely asleep and rolling it around yourself like a burrito so that I have to yank a corner of it to cover myself. Seriously. If I’m tired, cranky, and COLD I will NOT be as gentle with our precious linens as I normally strive to be. When you do this and I then put my freezing butt on your to warm it up, don’t whine. Its your own fault, I was perfectly warm when I had a blanket.

I suppose that last tip really applies more to Hubs, but I guess it can be generalized out to “don’t play tug-of-war with your blankets”.

In the next few days I probably should get out a needle and do some mending on the edges of the blanket, as the self-bias edging is starting to disinigrate. It’s not that high on my to-do list, though.

I wish I could dry my clothes outside on a clothes line. When I was a kid and we lived in the house on Forest St in Denver, the dryer was old and horrid. It took three hours to dry a single load, so the things that tended to get uncomfortably crunchy went in the dryer (towels and jeans) and everything else was hung outside to dry in the sunshine.

Sun dried clothes are a little stiff at first but they smell SO GOOD, and there’s just something wonderful about the way white twin sheets look drying in the spring breeze, and you’re less likely to have static cling issues. Unfortunately, Hubs is seriously allergic to anything green, I swear he’s going to break out in hives if he hugs Oscar the Grouch every kind of pollen in the state, and there isn’t a week, much less a month, something he’s allergic to isn’t blooming. Drying the laundry outside so that it gets covered in pollen would probably not be the best thing for his health.

However, even air drying one load a week is good for the environment and your electric bill, so I try to hang a load on clothes hangers and set those up on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom when the time/inspiration/remember to do it all hits at once.  I had a little spin dryer from Laundry Alternative (who have fantastic customer service, by the way- I really like them, I had an issue with something, I don’t remember what, but I was just irritated as hell with it, and they not only fixed the problem but I got a very nice letter that was not a form letter apologizing!) which I used with the Wonder Wash when I lived in the dorms, and that was great, but the loads are tiny, and frankly I don’t have the attention span for small loads. One thing I did learn from doing nothing but small loads for a year, though, was that spin dryers are frikken GREAT.

What’s so great about spin dryers, Seannon? I am dying to know, and now that my curiosity is peaked, it must be sated with delicious knowledge!

Well, only since you asked so nicely. The great thing about spin dryers is that they cut the amount of time needed to dry a load of laundry to less the the time to wash it. Laundry day goes SO MUCH FASTER. Your clothes get cleaner and last longer, because the mineral deposits and soap scum in the water and shoved right out of the fabric, and the heat and lint damage from the dryer is cut down considerably. Black clothes stay black longer, delicate clothes dry faster, you get lower electric bills, and life is pretty damn peachy. It is a bit of a pain in the ass to move the load from the washer to the spin dryer, and then to the regular dryer, but given the benifits, it’s not so bad.

As a side note, there is also no way in hell I will do cloth diapers (which I’m planning on using) without one of these bad boys, just because it gets rid of all the gunk that can stay in cloth and impair it’s absorptive abilities. Anyone who has ever dealt with cloth diapers knows what I am talking about- having to do the random clarifying washes with baking soda because the hard water deposits on the fabric are making the diaper not work. Screw that. I want a spin dryer so I don’t have to deal with it.

Laundry Alternative has one for full sized loads, and I’ve also looked at the Spin X. The full sized spin dryer from Laundry Alternative is less expensive, but I’d kind of like to try both of them and compare them side by side.

I might pick up the larger sized spin dryer and try to hang a couple of loads a week in the bathroom this summer, if our electric bills keep going the way they’re going.

Have you ever tried a spin dryer? Do you have any questions? Feel free to comment!

After reading all the fantastic blogs about doing your daughters hair I felt the need to feel pretty and be pampered myself. I have a few types of face mask left from helping a friend move, and a few face masks from various sales I’ve picked up, so I did two. Hubs noticed a difference, and my face feels better.

I have very dry skin and very sticky face-oil, so what little oil my skin makes does not get pushed onto the surface, like with regular skin, but rather sticks on the inside of the pores and gets dark. On my nose, that goes so far as to create blackheads, and elsewhere I’ve just been getting coarser and coarser pores, which blows. I know the cheap answer to that (aspirin face masks) but ran out of Aspirin a while ago, and when I ask Hubs to get some he keeps returning with ibuprofen, which doesn’t cut it.

To clear your skin up, take one to five of the cheapest aspirin you can get (you want the coating to be thin) and put a few drops of hot water on them. After they start to crumble, you can mix it with aloe gel (it will get watery) and apply it to your face. The gel will form a sticky mask and the aspirin won’t fall off. If you don’t have/like aloe (which I ALWAYS have on hand- between the amount of cooking I do and how easily I get sunburned, I need it regularly) , some people swear by honey but I find it maddeningly itchy.

Wash your face with a flannel washcloth and warm to hot water. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. Salicylic acid it the ingredient in all the expensive anti acne face goop, it’s a great exfoliant and makes your skin silky soft.

Another cheap treat is to pour some powdered milk into a bathtub with a couple of hand fulls of aspirin tablets. The aspirin and the lactic acid in the milk exfoliate your skin gently, and the natural fat in the milk stops this process from drying your skin out way too much. Soak for as long as you can take it, and then rub yourself all over with a scratchy washcloth. Rinse in a shower and cover yourself with a thin layer of oil- olive oil will work, but I prefer jojoba or grape seed oil. Put a little extra oil on your feet and put on socks and  your feet will be lovely that evening. This makes your skin incredibly soft and lush and wonderful, and the last time I did this Hubs kept chasing me around the house to pet me. This was cute at first but after two days I started to get annoyed!

Anyway, those are my favorite cheapy little indulgences that really seem to make a huge difference on my dry, easily irritated skin. A little splash of oil wiped over damp skin is waaay cheaper than the expensive non-scented, anti allergenic lotions I can find (half of which STILL make my skin break out or do something horrible). I think, combined, everything ends up costing less than .20 for this little luxury, which helps me not feel deprived and then spend on something stupid like… um, clay based face masks on sale.

I have a pair of friends who are doing their best to make sure that their children are well-licked rats.

One of the interesting bits of research that can be done on nature vs. nurture is on rats. Mother rats will accept ratlings that aren’t hers for the first several weeks, so you can swap them out. They took neurotic(for a rat) rat mothers and swaped babies with well-adjusted rat mommas. Turns our the well adjusted rat mommas produced well adjusted rat babies and neurotic rat mommas made for neurotic little rats. The big difference was in how much time the mother rats licked the babies. There have been other studies done that show something similar- if you take the rat babies away for a little while every day and then give them back, the rat mommas will over groom the babies, and it turns out those rats end up much more emotionally stable, willing to explore, have fewer stress hormones, and all other kids of positive changes.

I’m not going to pull up the research here but I’ve read enough primate psychology to think that grooming is just as importaint, if not more, for humans. I also have a hunch that a lot of what we consider beauty in our culture is time spent grooming with extra points for time others spend grooming you (hence, salons).

Anyway, I want to make sure that the kidlets are well licked rats. I did Girl Child’s hair when she was here and she’s been bugging B, who can’t do hair AT ALL, for hair play time. I think I will be able to spend some lovely one on one time with her in the mornings doing her hair before school. However, I can barely do MY hair…so I’ve been reading several blogs that describe how to do little girl’s hair. Some of them are fantastic.

They also make me feel a little, I don’t know… melancholy? Sad? My Mom knows nothing of how to handle hair (she’s kept her hair in a variation of a pixie for over 30 years, and finally branched into… a bob) and never did mine as a child. My clothes were usually hand-me-downs from adults that looked ridiculous on me, so I learned early on not to care about what I looked like because frankly, it hurt to much. I was never one of the well groomed children. I was always clean, but my parents were a combination of poor, ashamed, and distracted (both of them have serious Absent Minded Professor traits). My Mom was also HIGHLY conflicted about me dressing up or trying to look pretty, since she’d been the target of a child predator.

I am reminded of the bit in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows where Snape is describing James Potter. Snape’s a scraggly, unloved but brilliant child who is exquisitely sensitive, and knows exactly what he does not have and feels an odd mix of shame and stubborn pride out it.  Out walks James Potter, the treasured only child of elderly parents, who glows with a patina of being a well loved and cherished.

I want my kids to be like James (though hopefully kinder), and I strongly emphathised with Snape.

Anyway, I’m going to start doing Girl Kiddo’s hair when she moves in, even though she’s 8 and a little older than most of the girls in these blogs, they are great and totally worth reading!

http://babesinhairland.blogspot.com/ I read all the archives and spent a whole day looking at the pictures. SO CUTE!

http://hair4myprincess.blogspot.com/ Very cute little girl, and nice, clear instructions.

http://cutegirlshairstyles.blogspot.com There are also pictures there of Dad’s work, which is nice, and some of the styles are really cute and inventive (I love the 4-leaf-clover St. Patty’s day hair and the plastic-eggs-IN-the-pigtails easter hair). Seriously adorable.

http://pigsandponies.blogspot.com/ Great photos, some of the stuff is too young for Girl Child, but still- adorable.

If you know other good blogs for little girls hair for 8 year olds, let me know!

Hubs and I did a no-engagement-at-all elopement. We had never talked about marriage before, and we were sitting in his car talking about various mortgage options, at 12:00 on a Friday night. We were looking at buying a house and had one we wanted. I lamented about the fact that we couldn’t use his VA benefits because we weren’t married and it wasn’t like that was going to happen.

“Why not?” he said.

“It’s not like we’re ever going to get married!”

“I would take you to the courthouse Monday.”

I was shocked. I had been in a long term relationship where I had wanted to do the forever thing with him and he was completely against it. Hubs and I had a bit of a whirlwind romance (I think I asked him to move in with me after we were dating for 3 weeks. When I say the man can cook, I mean it!). We’d only been together for 7 months. We’d only known each other for seven months- my usual modeous operendai was to be someone’s friend for 9 months before even thinking about romance.

We spent the weekend in our underwear playing video games, watching movies, and occasionally pausing the video games to mention pros and cons. He had to work late Monday, so we went to get the paperwork Tuesday. Texas has a three day wait law, so we were going to get married Friday… until we found out we could get an exemption to that by hanging out at the courthouse.

My Mom was with me just because I’d wanted to take her on some errands that morning. If I’d known I was getting married that day, I probably wouldn’t have had her with me. I was in berkenstocks, hand-me-down seersucker pants my friend Kempe gave me, and an old black button-down shirt that I’d spilled salsa on that morning, which had decided to stain the front of my blouse. I was wearing no makeup, my hair needed a washing, and I giggled through the entire ceremony. Herb Evans was our JP and he was AWESOME. He had a great sense of humor and didn’t lecture us, and when we had no idea what to say or do and I started to panick he just said “It does not really matter, honey, you’ll be just as married in 10 minutes no matter which one you pick.” Normally people I don’t know calling me honey make me want to stab them in the eyes, but Judge Evans was really cool, and it was just perfect.

So there we were, no one there but my Mom (who was forbidden from talking), I looked like crap, he’d arranged to go into work late and was dressed like crap, and we only got one picture of the whole thing, which I don’t even have.

I called everyone on the way home, many were shocked and thought I was pulling a prank on them.  I told them we were going to have an ACTUAL wedding on the 4th of July, 2009.

Well, it’s coming up. I’m starting my new job on Monday. Hubs is interviewing for a job he’s been trying to get for two years on Monday. B and Goddess Girl are moving in around that time period. Between three new jobs, two moves, and half my bridesmaids not being able to make it because they have professional obligations they can’t weasel out of, it’s pretty hopeless.

I’ve done crap for planning. I’ve done nothing for budgeting. I know what dress I want (I had the pattern for it before I met Hubs, actually) but I don’t have the time, energy, or money to make a mock up and then make the real thing. Wedding planning seems to be designed to drive people like me away, screeming into the night.

What’s so bad about wedding planning? Stuff like this.

Bridal hair styles must be the best looking hairdos at a wedding ceremony because she is the center of attention and will be remembered forever. It is the day of her life that she has waited for since she was little girl and she’s to make it the most unforgettable affair. There are so numerous additional concerns but bridal hair styles are at the most important. Bridal updos not only have to fit the person but also match the dress, the veil, the wedding colors, the shoes and the whole atmosphere of the wedding ceremony itself.

What the fuck hell is this? I have to match my hair to my shoes? My wedding day was not the day of my life I had been waiting for since I was a little girl. I wanted to get my first car, I wanted to go to college, and I wanted to run my own company. I did all of those before meeting Hubs and none of them involved depending on someone else of my happiness. When I dreamed of being married, that’s what it was- being in a healthy relationship, with kids, and having someone to love. My dreams had nothing to do with a big, expensive party full of waste (I will be damned before I spend $500 on a dress I’m going to wear ONCE) where most of my friends will be uncomfortable.

Here’s what I think I am going to do. I think I’m going to reschedule the  bloody thing for Haloween. I’ll throw a huge party at a nightclub. I’ll have a Zombie Walk towards the venue. I’ll have a cover charge and a VIP room- invited guests get to go to the VIP room where there will be food and not have to pay cover. I’ll have some kick ass drink specials for VIP guests, and all kinds of awesome local performers do their thing.

Ugh. I am just SO TIRED of the pretty, perfect, white wedding thing. I know there are women who love it, but it’s really, really, REALLY not me. I love the Offbeat Bride Tribe but I can’t do all the planning there, either.

Ugh. Just ugh.

It looks like things are moving forward nicely for B and the Kiddo to move in with us. This puts me in a little bit of an interesting situation.

I’m legally Boy Kiddo’s stepmom, but due to incredibly painful and convoluted custody issues, he does not actually know this, nor will he until this summer. We are still in contact with him, but irregularly and it’s frustrating and heartbreaking, on everyone’s side. Boy Kiddo also has a Mom already, and I have no idea what the hell the Male Child will call me- I’m not his aunt, which is my usual name with kids, but if anything involving the word Mom or Mommy comes out of his mouth involving me, his bio mom will flip her gasket.

Girl Kiddo has a relationship with her bio mom, even though B has custody. She visits her bio mom every other weekend. I almost cried when B asked me to co-parent his daughter because frankly, that means a hell of a lot more coming from him than most proposals I have seen. The Girl Child and I get along fantastically and well before I’d even met her I was thinking of her as my kid.

To clarify a bit: I called several of my friends mothers Mom when growing up, and one of them I’m still close too and call Mom regularly. To me, being a mother has jack and shit to do with biology, and it’s all about being there, kissing boo boos, making sure homework is done, cooking, sewing, and putting money away in college funds for the kids. It’s about thining about what’s best for them now, figuring out how to bring about their talents, supporting their intersts, and using your adult perspective to try to smooth the path they want to walk on. It’s about providing for them now, but also providing for their future. As soon as I started thinking about science summer camps and baseball for the boy child, and enrichment activities for the girl child, I became their parent. They became my kid. Boy child is my son and girl child is my daughter.

I won’t be called anything like, oh this is my Dad’s new wife, or this is my Dad’s girlfriend. Both of those focus on the relationship between me and their fathers, which quite frankly has nothing to do with them. While that’s a connection we share, it’s not the primary one. I’m sure as hell not going to be giving up delicious Mojitos to put money in the college fund of a kid who just happens to have sprung from my current shag partners loins. I’m not going to give up sleep or worry about caring for a child who’s just a non-primary partners kid. Sure, I can be friends with the kid and help out from time to time, but that’s not the same thing as being a parent at all.

So, when trying to define a parent-child type relationship what do they call me? I’m going to leave it up to them. If they want to call me Mom that’s fine with me, and I hope it does not cause drama with my partners ex’s.

The trick is given my warped decidedly unconventional feelings about what makes a family, I don’t see any problems with a kid having 6 moms, or none. Love is what makes a family, the decision to come together and reach for goals together, and the people you choose to have as your family are just as much your family as the people you meet who happen to share genetic material with.

I’m so excited to start this new part of my life. I’m looking forward to finding out what sort of name the kids come up with for me. I just hope that it does not cause a problem.

The turkey dinner was a success.

Hubs warned me when I bought the turkey that he did not like turkey. At all. I just laughed- I mean, who does not like turkey? Really?! Is that even possible? It turns out that my husband is not simply a funny man, he really meant what he said. He’d never had turkey that he liked, and he hates turkey.

The turkey just out of the oven. Isn't it pretty?

Well, at least we had people coming over so I wouldn’t be forced to eat a 20 pound turkey all by myself, I thought.

Boy, was I wrong.
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I have this desire to be what I think of as Wonder Wife. I compare myself to Wonder Wife and given that Wonder Wife is, well, Wonder Wife, I always fall short.

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When I was a child, I had one friend who’s mom used dishrags to wash their dishes and it made me queasy. After all, everyone used sponges to wash their dishes! Using rags seemed somehow less clean to me. I was always grossed out by it.

Mom even had a sponge rotation set up to keep everything frugal. We’d get sponges with the scrubby backs, and once a week (when we remembered, I don’t know how often we went weeks or months without doing this) the sponge was thrown in the dishwasher. When the sponge portion pleaded with us for mercy wore out, it would go under the bathroom sink to be used there to clean the sink and tub. When that sponge was replaced, there was a special spot on the far left of the counter under the bathroom sink. That’s where the “dirty sponge” used to clean the poopy chair toilet was kept.  After a couple months there, that sponge was thrown out and replaced with the old sink sponge. The circle of sponge life went on.

Imagine my horror when I learned that a fairly new kitchen sponge probably harbored more, and nastier bacteria than my poopy chair toilet sponge. Let’s just say that I do my best to ignore this piece of reality for the sake of my fragile sanity … I … I forgot what I was talking about. Moving on!

I was doing my monthly budget check of trying to find where I was spending money where I could cut back, and my frugal eye fell on my use of disposable cleaning supplies. I’m a clean freak and frankly, my use of paper towels was definitely over the top. I own plenty of cleaning towels (plus the occasional ratty old bathroom towel, cut up into handy sized and edged), so why wasn’t I using them? In fact, why was I using disposable cleaning products like sponges and paper towels, anyway? What the hell was someone who was raised by hippies tries to be environmentally conscious doing with a Swiffer?

It was the ick factor. I was convinced, deep down inside, that sponges were cleaner than dish rags and that it was cleaner to throw away everything when I was finished. Since I desperately want my house to be clean, and it’s something I have mild anxiety about, I was easy pickings when it came to advertising companies convincing me that I wanted to spend lots of money on single-use products that would not only make cleaning more sanitary, but perhaps even faster, easier, and more plesant.

Well, I squared my shoulders and decided that I would examine this old notion of mine, but when I tried to research the differences between using sponges and dish rags, I kept getting drawn into websites that were about single-use sponges that you buy in bulk from the grocery store. This is, in fact, the exact opposite of what I was trying to find. It turns out that the only place I could get any information about sponges vs. dishrags was a college agricultural extension research paper that found that dishrags were actually cleaner. Everything else I could find were people like me talking about how gross dishrags were, but with nothing to back up that feeling other than…well, feelings.

I figured I wasn’t going to get any other information on the subject given that dishrags and sponges cost about as much, but the rags last just about forever and the sponges wear out very quickly. It’s not in anyone’s interest to convince me to use dishcloths. No one makes money doing it. It’s more environmentally friendly, for sure, but it’s not a big change, so no one is going to do in-depth analysis about it. There aren’t even nifty new gadets to get, like LED lightbulbs or compact florecents, so it’s not like there are a huge number of nerds with beautiful graphs telling me how much money I will spend or save. For the sake of science I needed to do a 30 day challenge and use my dishrags.

That was about two months ago. It was really, really hard at first. I may or may not have cried in the kitchen over it in the second week, but since I did give it a 30 day try, I don’t think I’ll ever switch back. I developed a system and I can tell my house is cleaner now.

I have a basket in my laundry room (which is attached to the kitchen) and I toss dirty kitchen rags in there. I do it every 2-3 days if it’s nasty, but on Fridays regardless of how clean they look. When I compare this to the all too common once a month I had been dishwashing my sponge, I’m a little embarrased. You can much more easily tell when the rags need a wash, which makes them look a little grodier in your kitchen but actually keeps everything SO MUCH CLEANER. They go into the whites load, which I only now bleach (as much as I hate dirt, I hate the smell of bleach more, and I’ve had it destroy too many things on accident already). I already had a bulk pack of Scott or 3m green scrubbies, which I cut in half. The one sheet has lasted 6 months, and the only reason I replaced it was because it got used to clean things during the move that I didn’t want rubbed on my dishes. The bathroom sponges have been replaced with rags, too, but now I use a toilet brush for the bowl of the toilet exclusively, and I swish-and-wipe the toilet with countertop spray and toilet paper that I just flush daily, so I no longer have a dirty toilet sponge in my bathroom giving me hives and nightmares that might contaminate other things under the sink.

Since the switch, I’ve been shocked to note that my dishes have actually gotten cleaner. I know that there’s fewer germs sitting around my kitchen because of my lazy-ass sponge habits. I’m no longer dropping money on sponges at the store, which is going to save me little bits of money every month to help me reach my big goals. It’s better for the environment. My bathroom is better off, too.

Everyone knows the Latte Factor is the $1-2 most people spend on stupid things that don’t actually bring them any more joy. It’s habitual spending that drains away your money in dribs and drabs- it makes your big dreams starve for funding while you’re bleeding to death throug papercuts. When I have a hard time trying something that could save me money because of some sort of irrational squeamishness, I now call that my Sponge Factor. Given how miserable I was making the switch, and how sponges have proven (in my house, with my cleaning habits- this is not an attack on anyone who uses sponges)