Home-made cleaning

As I’ve been going deeper into my old ways of eating I dug up some old recipes and created some new ones. Cooking has been a lot more fun nowadays since Annabelle can actually eat most of what I make. Annabelle loves picking up her food and feeding herself and usually tries to take the spoon away from me and feed herself with it nowadays too, and she’s actually gotten pretty good at it, the food makes it into her mouth! It is still messy but that’s ok.

Actually it’s very messy when she feeds herself. She discovered that when she drops food on the floor the dogs will rush over to eat it, and she loves watching things fall. I also sometimes will fill her spoon and put it on the high chair and let her pick it up on her own. She usually does pick it up but sometimes she just plays with the food. Annabelle eats a lot of kale and beets and other things that aren’t so easy to clean up once they’ve had a little time to dry on the high chair. As we all know by now I’m paranoid about everything Annabelle so finding a cleaning product that was safe if she got it in her mouth was important because sometimes water just isn’t enough. I found Dapple Toy and Surface cleaner which I used to clean her high chair and all of her toys. It’s a great product but it ain’t cheap and if you have a baby or have had a baby you know that you can go through A LOT of spray cleaning toys and high chairs.

I was over at my friend Nicoles house one night and she pulled out her spray to clean the high chair. Home made spray. genius! Why didn’t I think of that? Like the teacher that I am I love to steal great ideas so I was determined to come home and make my own home made spray once my bottle of Dapple ran out. Lucky me that I was still on my first bottle. Anyways, Nicoles spray cleaner had some borax and other stuff in it, stuff I didn’t have on hand so I looked for some common ingredients for home made baby safe cleaners and ended up making my own little mix.

2 parts water

1 part white vinegar (I always have white vinegar at home because I use it for cleaning the fridge and lots of other stuff. You can use it to clean vegetables too.) I know it stinks but I promise that once it dries the smell goes away.

A few drops of tea tree oil, which is a superb disinfectant (I always have this at home too because it works miracles as a spot treatment for a breakout and for cold sores)

A few drops of sweet orange essence (I bought this a few days later at Sprouts just to try to get it to smell good. You can use whatever essential oil you like or none at all)

I’ve used a few bottles worth now and I love it. I love how well it works and I love how much money it saves me. I love it so much that now I’m on a kick to make other home made cleaning products. The goal is to make window and glass cleaner, a wood cleaner if I can figure it out, laundry detergent and possibly even dish soap. So if anyone has any home made cleaners they use and love please please share your ‘recipes’ with me!