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Cleaning With Essential Oils

October 30, 2015 Leave a Comment

I’ve been using essential oils for 90% of our cleaning and household needs for a little over 2 years now, and I have finally decided to share more about my system. It’s become such a habit, and I can’t remember the last time I actually purchased anything pre-made from the store or Amazon!

Many people think that making your own household cleaners is hard. The reality, however, is that it is 10x easier than running to the store! I can make my own household cleaners for less effort than it takes to get my kids buckled in their carseats– truly!

Not only is it easier than going to the store, it is also cheap– DIRT cheap (a cleaning pun! See what I did there?). I can clean my whole house (including laundry, toilets, carpets, windows, hands, you name it!) naturally, without harmful or harsh chemicals, for less than $10/month!!

Here’s the cost breakdown. Using just lemon and thieves, you would spend $50/year on oils, and $63/year on supplies. That’s just $10.08/month, for EVERYTHING your house will use!! Add in a few more oils like peppermint and lavender, occasionally, won’t really raise the cost, since you’ll be using less of the other oils to do so (and having peppermint and lavender on hand is always a good idea anyways, especially if you get frequent headaches like I used to). These are also some/all of the items used by Zerorez Jacksonville carpet cleaning services to get the best cleaning result.

None of these recipes or systems are fancy, so if you’re looking for something that Martha Stewart would make, you’ve come to the wrong place!! 🙂 In the interest of having a life, I want to spend my chore time actually cleaning, not wearing myself out by making the supplies. After trial and error, these are what I’ve used to streamline cleaning with essential oils.

My system has been put to the test over the years. I actually refined this system back when we had our foster children, which meant I had FOUR stinky boys to clean up after (not to mention we were staging and selling our house at the same time!) When our foster boys first arrived, our family got sick with some type of bug every other week. Once I started using essential oils to make these cleaning supplies, we got sick only twice more in 6 months. To say it was a night and day difference is an understatement, and I NEVER have to worry about my kids getting harmed by my cleaning supplies!

To make these, you will need Lemon, Peppermint, Lavender, and On Guard/Thieves essential oils in stock. On a strict budget, you could do well with just lemon for everything, since it’s a natural disinfectant that works like bleach (you can actually mix it with hydrogen peroxide to “bleach” just about anything!). If you just used lemon for everything, you would probably need 2 bottles a year. At $10/bottle, this is very cost effective for ALL your cleaning supplies! When you add in On Guard/Thieves ($30/bottle) and Lavender or Peppermint ($20-30/bottle as well), the cost still isn’t bad, since one bottle will last a year when you just use it for cleaning purposes (there are lots of other helpful purposes as well, but that’s another post!). Visit MaidEasy.com.au to achieve the best results.

In addition, all you will need to clean your ENTIRE HOUSE are NINE INGREDIENTS!:

1. baking soda (costs $2/year if you buy a big container from Walmart)

2. Ami powder cleanser ($2 for 3 months worth, totaling $8/year– please do not buy on Amazon! It’s ridiculously expensive compared to Target and Walmart, for some reason!)

3. white vinegar ($5/year at Walmart or Target)

4. witch hazel ($8/year)

5. Bronner’s unscented castile soap ($12 for 6 months’ worth, totaling $24/year)

6. super wash soap ($8/year, just for laundry detergent)

7. vegetable glycerin ($6/year)

8. citric acid ($5/year, just for the dish detergent, so it might even last longer than a year)

9. borax ($5/year at walmart, just for the dish detergent so it might even last longer than a year)

You also need to use GLASS BOTTLES, because the citrus oils attach themselves to toxins and will eat through any plastic containers (yikes!). I got mine for $2/each a few years ago, and they’ve lasted very well!

So, without further ado, here is my system for cleaning with essential oils!

Counters, mirrors, hardware, doorknobs, appliances– basically any surface!

For all of the above, I use my “Blue Bottle”. I combine the vinegar with water from the tap, 50/50. I then add 10-20 drops of lemon (or, sometimes, orange!) essential oil. That’s it! It smells AMAZING, and it cleans and polishes everything! No more windex– just one handy dandy bottle that cleans 90% of messes, cuts through grease like nobody’s business, and kills germs on contact!

This bottle works especially well for windows and polishing sink hardware. I used it to make our stainless steel sink back in CA shine whenever we had to show the house.

Kitchen Sink and Bathtub

I first sprinkle it all with water, then sprinkle the powder cleanser over it (the initial water spray gets the powder to stick, so I use less). I use my dollar store scrub ducky (reserved only for cleaning sinks and bathtubs– never dishes) to scrub the surface, rinse it, then spray the whole thing down with my “Brown Bottle” (On Guard or Thieves spray– 30-40 drops added to a 50/50 mix of witch hazel and vinegar). Since this essential oil blend is more expensive than lemon, I reserve my “brown bottle” for my dirtier jobs.

Lest you doubt how effective On Guard/Thieves blends are, take a look at this petri dish experiment holding it up to hand sanitizer! Can you guess which one wins?

You know what’s even scarier? Someone did a study a few years ago testing kitchen sinks…and found that they were harboring more dangerous bacteria than a TOILET! Yikes!!! Let’s get those sinks clean, people!

Speaking of toilets…

Toilet

I haaaate cleaning toilets, but it must be done daily when one has boys (no more details, you don’t want them, trust me). I use my “Brown Bottle” for any exterior surfaces, and the Ami cleanser with a toilet brush for the “inside”. Once in a while, I will also throw in some hydrogen peroxide and lemon oil, but it’s not absolutely necessary.

Foaming Hand and Dish Soap

You’d think this would be hard, but it’s not! You mix together Castile soap, vegetable glycerin, Thieves/On Guard, and some water, and it makes the most delectable smelling hand soap! After I’ve washed my hands or the dishes, I catch myself sniffing my hands, it’s that good 😉

Laundry Detergent

Did you know that you can make your own Laundry Detergent for pennies? Neither did I– until I started cleaning with essential oils.

This recipe doesn’t even involve grating any bar soap– something common with DIY recipes. But I don’t have time for that, so I like this recipe best! You make it in a huge 5 gallon bucket, and it lasts about 6 months! You just need baking soda, the super wash baking soda, castile soap and a few essential oils of your choosing!

Dish Detergent

Full disclosure– I have not tried this recipe yet, but I’ve been wanting to! I cannot wait to try.

Hardwood Floors and Tile

I use my vinegar/citrus “Blue Bottle” to spray the floors as I mop. I add a bit of orange oil if I really want them to shine! It makes the whole house smell like an orange grove!

Carpet Cleaner/Deodorizer

I used this trick a ton when we were staging our house! Fill a sugar sprinkle jar full of baking soda, then add 10 drops of peppermint and 10 drops of lavender. Sprinkle the mixture on top of rugs or carpets, wait 10 minutes, then vacuum up! Your house will smell so clean and divine, you won’t even believe it! No more musty carpet smell up close!

Stains in Carpet

You don’t even need the essential oils for this. Just sprinkle on some baking soda directly to the stain and pour baking soda on top! Just like 7th grade science class, the mixture will bubble, loosening the stain. Scrub, wait a few minutes, then vacuum it up! Simple!

All Natural “Febreze”

Just a 75/25 mix of water to witch hazel, along with 5-10 drops of lavender, and you have a pillow and couch freshener! Just spritz the room whenever you feel like you could use a relaxing burst of scent. Mix in a bit of peppermint for combating the germs!

Other/Pests

Peppermint + cinnamon (or On Guard/Thieves) is also very good for keeping bugs away. Just put some in a spray bottle filled with water and spray the door frames– ants, and mice, especially, hate the smell and stay far away!

That’s it! Now you know my “dirty secrets” (another pun!) for cleaning with essential oils on a budget. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! I love responding to comments, as always 🙂

Backyard Chickens

October 28, 2015 1 Comment

Our family pulled the trigger! We knew when we bought a small house with a large backyard that we would want some backyard chickens, eventually, but it wasn’t until I figured out that we were buying THREE DOZEN eggs a week (!!!) that we decided to step up our timeline, despite how busy Jesse is in his graduate program.

The first step was to find or build the right coop. At first, I had dreams of building one “from scratch” (a chicken pun, get it? Be prepared for many more!), but once Jesse’s PhD program began late summer, all of those dreams vanished. I just knew that we’d never get around to it, let alone carry out Garden Paving. I’m pretty handy with a saw and drill, but felt like it was too much for me to handle by myself (although I constructed all of the garden beds and the irrigation systems you see in the pictures above!).

So, as usual, I turned to Craigslist. I saw this coop for $400 about a 45 minute drive away, and thought, “I wish that were in our price range!”. A few days later, the woman reduced the price to $250 since they had a moving deadline! I love moving deadlines– it means that they are 900x more willing to make a deal with you since they need something GONE. I asked her if she would part with it for $150, and she said yes!!

A picture of the coop at its old location, with Gregory standing beside it for size context.

Next, there was a fair bit of drama, wherein we had to take apart the coop (this took 4+ hours…Jesse was not happy…) and pay $30 to rent a trailer to transport it. Initially we hired someone to move it for us, but he no-showed on the morning of! The husband of the family who sold it to us turned out to be really nice and hooked the trailer up to his truck and drove it all the way to our house when he saw that we were in a jam (plus, he was motivated– moving deadline, remember?) We got it to our backyard, but it was in pieces. It took another 2-3 hours for Jesse to put it back together with the help of a nice neighbor who volunteered to help. 🙂 As a side note, I am so happy that our neighbors support us having backyard chickens! In fact, they are all pretty excited!

As a side note, here is what this side of our backyard looked like when we bought the house.

And now here it is– chicken coop done! (Ignore our rubbermaid-chicken-carrier!).

The window at the bottom is not yet part of the coop. I plan on adding it to the door so that the boys can peak in and see the chickens whenever they want! We will also be adding a separate nesting box where you see the boards (that’s why they aren’t painted). And, speaking of paint, we have leftover exterior paint, so pretty soon the coop will match our house!

The next step was finding the right chickens for the right price. Since it’s autumn here, we knew that baby chicks were out of the question since they wouldn’t be fully feathered before winter hit. Once again, I turned to Craigslist, looking for someone getting rid of the right breed. I really wanted sweet tame chickens, since I knew that they would become part of the family.

And, once again, Craigslist to the rescue! I found another family with a moving deadline (seriously, moving deadlines are the jackpot when it comes to Craigslist deals). They had 3 six month old Rhode Island Reds for sale at $35/each. I asked if she’d take $60 for all 3, and she said yes! The boys and I went to pick them up last Friday, and it was love at first sight. Their names are Henrietta, Missy and Nessie.

One of the three is molting, however, and 1-2 eggs every day isn’t enough to offset our grocery bill. So, on Monday, we went to a farm in Wylie and picked up two Americaunas which we named “Bushel” and “Peck”. The lady assured me that these would be the leader of the pack once the new “pecking order” was established (not a pun, that’s actually where the term came from, haha!), but, as it turns out, our Rhode Islands are definitely in charge! They didn’t even let the 2 new ones out of the coop for the first day! Bossy hens!

Our boys just LOVE their new friends. Gregory cannot contain himself when we find a new egg, and he begs to do absolutely every chore associated with the chickens. There’s definitely been a lot of laughter over here, that’s for sure!

While I may feel like the crazy chicken lady, when I sit down and think about it, this has been coming for a long time. In fact, we might have reached full-on hippie status over here– we drive an all electric car, we compost, we have 6 garden beds, we only buy from thrift stores and now we have backyard chickens! Oh well, time to embrace it, I guess!

He Knows My Name

September 29, 2015 1 Comment

Lately, Gregory has been using our car trips to start conversations about all manner of things. I love how his little mind is exploding with depth lately– this almost-5-years-old stage of development is so wonderful to witness.

Over the past few weeks, our car rides have consisted of all types of deep childhood dilemmas, such as: How long will it take him to become an adult, and will AJ also be an adult someday? When he gets older, will he be a Dadda, or a Momma? Why did Anakin Skywalker turn into Darth Vader? Where does one buy a baby, and how can he get one? Are all types of chocolate brown? Is there really a yogurt monster, and why is he so angry?

So it was no surprise to me that Gregory wanted to have a conversation the moment we got in the car to leave for the zoo today.

“Momma,” he said. “Jesus really loves me.”

“Aw, that’s a nice thing to talk about. How do you know that?” I was expecting a ‘Sunday School answer’, even though we try to stay away from anything trite sounding when we talk to our kids about life.

“I just know it Momma. You know how I know it?”

“How?”

“Because, Momma. He knows me. He knows my NAME. That’s how I know He loves me.”

Despite the fact that my mind was on a million other logistical things at the moment, I felt the immediate impact of his words. I even felt a bit teary. I couldn’t explain why those words affected me so greatly, but they did.

As we kept driving, I kept mulling the words over and over again. “He knows my name.” Darn those four year olds and their ability to say the most profound things!

I first wondered about how Gregory ever thought to voice such an amazing concept in this way. I remembered back to our grocery trip a few days prior, where a stranger told him he was a really cute little boy and “what a good helper you are!” Right after she left, Gregory giggled and said, “She was nice, momma! But she called me ‘little boy’. She doesn’t really know me. She doesn’t know my real name.”

She doesn’t know my REAL name.

What is it that a toddler understands about names that we as adults have forgotten?

I started thinking about how we use names in our society. We call it “first name basis” for a reason– only your closest friends call you by your first name, whereas everyone else uses, “Mr. or Mrs.” as a respectful title that preserves a type of anonymity and distance in the public sphere.

I started remembering back to the “playground days” of my childhood (a difficult thing for me to do, since I was mostly homeschooled) and to the way children mock one another by distorting their name into something silly or disparaging. Kids love to name-call, and it’s easy for caregivers to say it’s wrong and mean.

But are we as adults any different?

I don’t know about you, but lately it’s difficult to go on Facebook or any social media for more than five minutes before encountering sickening news about the world around us. There is such a disregard for human life at this juncture in our history, whether we’re talking about immigration, political corruption, black lives matter, refugees, vaccines, police brutality, gun control or wars in the Middle East.

Regardless of who is right and who is wrong on whatever issue is at hand, the consistently ugly part about it all is the way we reduce the opposing side to something less than human. My firm belief is that this attack on the humanity of those who disagree with us is meant to somehow give us distance and makes it easier to oppose them. We can just boil in our self righteous indignation, type “SMH” (shaking my head, as I recently discovered) and write them off.

It’s even easier to distance ourselves from the humanity of our opponent when we are all sitting behind our computer screens, preaching to the echo chamber, dog-piling our virtual opponent under verbose arguments that stream from our keys instead of our mouths. We also do it when we’re driving and someone cuts us off. “You idiot!” is the common G-rated phrase for this type of situation. We reduce our opponent’s humanity down to a spliced second.

We even go one step further than name calling. We reduce people to labels, because then we feel more comfortable and can make sense of a situation. Oh, they are just a liberal. They are just a conservative. They are just an environmentalist. They are just a terrorist. If we can just label them with a racial/political/geographical/ideological slur, then somehow they aren’t as much of a threat.

But how can something as complex as a human being, created in the image of God, be “just an” anything? To reduce anyone to their ideas, beliefs or actions is to destroy this image of God, to smash down what God created and said was “Good”. We love that which we can understand and control, and even our own inability can become an idol, as we hack off large parts of what it means to be a “person” in order to cling to our arbitrary definitions.

And then we have self-labeling, the most depressing kind of name calling. People feel empty and don’t know who they are, so they look for society to tell them which way is up. Our world is struggling to find self-worth, groping around amongst the things that make them angry, sad or happy, hoping to somehow find an identity within it all. These artificial labels do not fill them with any sort of real love or belonging, and so they succumb to hopelessness, finding ways to numb the pain. Having been there myself, I think this drive to be loved, cared for and truly understood is the cause of so many of problems in oursociety.

Organized religion isn’t always the answer either. As a teen growing up in a Christian School, I was always given the advice to “find my identity in Christ”, but that well intentioned concept was always too vague. It always seemed like the answer you gave someone when you didn’t really know the answer. In my experience, “finding one’s identity in Christ” just became yet another type of labeling. You are a Christian because you say the right phrases, do the right things, vote a specific way and only buy the Christianized consumer version of everything the secular world has to offer. But that sort of “identity in Christ” was just as empty– worse, even, because I felt like it should fill me, even though it didn’t.

When Gregory talks about names, he isn’t talking about what he’s done, what he believes, which Christian movie he just went to, or what mistake he is about to make. There is a name that only Christ has for my Gregory, and it is a love I will never be able to reduce with a label. He shouldn’t search for himself in Christ– he should search for Christ’s love in every moment of every day, basking in it, reminding himself constantly that no matter what happens, He is loved. When you are already full, you don’t go searching for other labels– you just enjoy the moments that you are given, glowing from within. Love is the only identity we need.

I once had a priest tell me in confession, “If you could only see yourself how God does, you would never loathe yourself again. If you could only see others as God sees them, you would never hate anyone else again.”

How I wish I could remember this basic concept! It isn’t about what I call myself. It isn’t about which ideas I align with, how I vote, which parenting philosophy I undertake, or which job I currently have. My name– the one that God has given me — is something more precious than any identity or label that the world tempts me with.

He sees me.

He loves me.

He knows my heart, and He knows what I need before I can ask for it.

He knows my name.

The Big Decision– School or Homeschool ?

September 9, 2015 2 Comments

A few months ago, the dilemma my mommy-brain centered around was whether or not to send my oldest (almost 5) to school or homeschool. Since he has an October birthday, he barely misses the cut-off for Kindergarten, but we knew he was ready for something.

I looked into quite a few options. We actually have a wonderful Christian/Montessori preschool just down the road from us. Even though it was expensive, we went to the Open House. We applied. We got put on the waiting list for a few months. Then we got in! We attended a trial day. We applied for financial aid. We got it.

And yet, we couldn’t pull the trigger!

It really came down to a few factors, and, growing up in a family that did a combination of both homeschool and private school, I’ve come up with what I think are the 3 biggest factors in this tough decision. The first and biggest factor is the individual child and what they need. The second factor is cost-to-benefit, and the third seems to be how the mom/potential teacher feels about it.

When it came to G’s personality, we realized that he was NOT yearning for tons of social interaction, all day, every day. In fact, after just an hour or two at a play group or get together he is CRAVING alone time to play, imagine, read and work on things. Sometimes he even closes his bedroom door and says, “Momma, I need some alone space right now”, and proceeds to play by himself for over an hour. To put him in school all day would be exhausting and stressful for his personality. On top of it, we realized that Gregory’s personality and mine work really well together when it comes to learning new things. He is a very focused kid, and I really enjoy that he can concentrate without bouncing off the walls like most kids I know.

The second factor was cost-to-benefit. Even with financial aid, the cost was going to be prohibitive for us as a family. At a few hundred dollars a month, we knew that it would basically suck up the majority of any income I was making from home– money that we were using to grow our savings account. I contemplated working a little bit more to pay for it, which is when we had a real nuts-bolts conversation about our goals as a family. My husband pointed out that we had worked really hard over the past few years (selling our CA house, moving across the country, etc.) to put ourselves in a position where I didn’t have to work. We placed ourselves in a wonderful city, FULL of opportunities to expand our children’s horizons with activities and museum memberships. Why disregard all of those blessings searching after what we “thought” we should need?

The third factor was how I felt about it. Funny enough, this was the dramatic part of the solution! It should’ve been all child-centered, but a lot of it was revolving around my strong feelings on the subject. On the days where I wasn’t waffling back and forth, I was absolutely un-done by the thought of G being in school 5 half days a week. For many of you who know our story, I had to wait a LONG time to get pregnant with G, and because it was something I had wanted for so long, the pregnancy/post-partum craziness felt like a beautiful (albeit, sleepless!) dream. Even on the hard days, I never once wished for my old life before kids. I can’t remember a time where I whined about it, because I was just so grateful to finally be a mom! It made me realize that all the years of heartache, wanting to be pregnant, were actually just preparing my heart to be steadfast and positive, despite the trials of those first few months.

Ever since, I have cherished my two boys’ every moment. Every new experience, every new discovery, every new milestone. I can’t imagine not being a part of these moments– at least not right now.

As a result, the one trial day (literally, just 3 hours) was one of the hardest days of my life. I walked him to his classroom as he carried his little pencil box and backpack, and nearly broke down right then and there. When the teacher greeted him (ever so sweetly) and walked him into class, I watched from behind the corner, and it was all I could do not to take him home with me. I tried to go grocery shopping and run a few errands, but I just kept crying. I called my mom, which helped, but the long and short of it all is that I parked my car and sat outside the school in the pouring rain for most of the time, just counting down the minutes until I could go back in and get him.

I tried not to let any of this show. I tried to be excited for G, wait and hear what he had to say about his “day” before making any hard and fast decisions about whether to officially enroll.

And you know the first thing he said when he got into the car with me?

“Mom. There were lots of fun things. The kids were really nice. But I couldn’t have any fun. I was just missing you the whole time.”

Heart-Breaker, right?

After that day, I just knew, deep down, that we weren’t ready to be away from each other just yet, even for just a few hours a day. Every year is a new decision and nothing is forever, but the time just wasn’t right yet. Long before we received our financial aid package in the mail, I already knew we were going to decline. After making the decision, I felt so sure, so unwavering. I wondered why I had ever doubted myself in the first place! I mean, I’m a teacher, for heavens sake! I make money teaching homeschool kids from home! I teach piano lessons to his age group! Why did I ever feel unqualified?

I think a lot of it had to do with falling prey to peer pressure. I “looked around” (a dangerous pastime) and realized that making the decision to homeschool was going against the grain, and that others would probably view it skeptically. As a result, I started to view myself skeptically, wondering if I was really up the challenge, despite the fact that I work with empowering homeschool moms every single day of my online job! This whole process has been a great learning experience for me to realize that I don’t need to call into question my own parenting instincts, just because many others are doing something different. Moms have their gut instinct for a reason.

Once we made the decision to keep G home, I went into full-on research mode (for those of you who know me, this is, by my nature, an intense thing!). I studied the Montessori method all summer, reading countless books and articles. I didn’t just want to know what the basic Montessori tools and activities were, I wanted to know the why behind it all, so that I could improvise without losing the heart of it. Even though I was already very familiar with the Montessori method, having taught piano in half a dozen Montessori schools, I learned so much through all this research.

I also researched everything there is to do in Dallas, and came up with quite a list for ways in which to interact with others and get out of the house a few times a week! So far, we’ve been to the monthly children’s art day at the museum, the library down the street, and the YMCA’s Play and Learn class that meets weekly (we had to drive a little bit further away to get a time that worked for us). The Play and Learn was especially helpful, since they spend 90 minutes with us doing hands on arts and crafts, story time, P.E. time, and even have 5 or 6 stations set up for individual hands-on learning (and it’s all FREE!). And the best part is that I didn’t have to clean up after any of the art projects! WIN!!

In addition, since we are not busy driving back and forth from school every day, we have the time (and money!) to put Gregory in a few organized activities this semester! As of right now, he is on a soccer team and has weekly swim and ballet lessons. He will also be taking daily piano lessons from me in small increments. This may sound like a LOT, but since we’re not waiting in carpool lines twice a day, it’s actually quite the “right” amount of busy.

In a future post, I will go over where we bought all of our materials and which books ended up being the most helpful in getting started, but for now, a few weeks into our school year, I am so happy that we made this choice. I am loving doing preschool/Kindergarden at home with both boys, and I am looking forward to a great year!
$Gregory Montessori math sticks$

Cleaning With Essential Oils

Backyard Chickens

He Knows My Name

The Big Decision– School or Homeschool ?

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