35 Days of Favorites: Homemade Toilet Cleaner

This post is part of a series called “35 Days of Favorites”, in honor of my 35th birthday. You can read more about the details here…

Alright, yesterday I wrote about how I buy natural laundry detergent, but today I’m sharing about how easy it is to clean your toilet with ingredients you have in your kitchen.

I used to buy the Norwex toilet cleaner, but it’s fairly pricey, so I switched to the homemade, because it’s the easiest thing ever.

Here’s what you do:

1) Pour about cup of vinegar into the toilet.

2) Sprinkle baking soda into the toilet.

3) Let it sit and fizz for about 10 minutes while you clean the rest of the bathroom.

4) Scrub with a brush, and you’re done.

It works fantastically well, it’s cheap and easy, and chemical-free. I keep a jug of vinegar and a box of baking soda with my cleaning supplies (which basically consist of a Norwex mop and rags).

I struggled with what kind of picture to include with this post – a photo of just a toilet wasn’t appealing to me, so here’s one of the whole bathroom!

For those of you who love your chemicals, you will be happy to know that I’m done with natural cleaning products posts now. There might be a few other natural things popping up, but this is it for the housecleaning!

And tell me: do you prefer chemical cleaners or natural products? Do you use a bit of both? Any products you can’t give up, no matter how bad they might be for the environment? (I confess – I have a bottle of Shout stain remover, for those emergencies when nothing else will do! There are some situations in which chemicals do a better job!)

What Potty Training is Teaching Me About Life

We are potty training these days.

I hate to even write that, because it sounds so official. If I wouldn’t tell anyone that we actually were, and things were going badly, we could just stop and try again later. Like in a year or two, after I’d recovered. (I’m not the hugest fan of potty training.)

But now it’s out there, and we will be official, and we will do it. Potty train or bust.

There are a couple of reasons why I have not been looking forward to this process. It takes so much discipline and commitment, and involves cleaning up so many messes. But most of all, I feel a sense of failure because I should know what I’m doing, but I don’t have a clue. I’ve done this all before, and I don’t really have an excuse for feeling so lost and uncertain as to how to proceed.

Anika uses the toilet every day, very effectively. But I don’t have a clue how we got to this point. I seem to have blocked that time period out of my mind. I remember that I did not enjoy it, but I do not know how we did it.

I had a lot of thinking to do before we started potty training Kaylia. I asked other people lots of questions, and read some books, and figured out a few things.

Basically, I figured out that this process will just be unpleasant. We’re dealing with poop and pee here. There’s no way around that.

I think that last time, with Anika, I tried to ease into the whole process as gently as possible, and avoid as many messes as we could.

And it took forever for her to catch on. No mess equals no motivation. For her or for me. And potty training went on for a year…I think. Like I said, my memory is quite foggy in that department.

So this time, I decided to accept the mess. To embrace it, even.

And that has made all the difference. I am actually anticipating the mess each day, because the only way Kaylia is going to learn to use the toilet is if she figures out that she’s tired of hot, fresh pee running down her legs, and decides to get her little butt over to the bathroom ASAP. (Thank goodness it’s summer – potty training accidents that happen outside are the very best kind.)

And so, this morning as I waited for the mess to occur, I was talking myself through this whole process, trying to focus on how much she’ll learn from these unpleasant experiences, and suddenly I realized how much I was embracing the concept of learning through pain. It’s the best way.

It’s not enjoyable, but pain and hardship teach us the greatest, richest, deepest lessons in life. Can I learn to anticipate the hard times because of the growth I know they will bring?

That’s a hard one! A load of poop in the panties of life is hard to deal with, but we must learn to make the best of things!