Spring Cleaning

I warned you yesterday that I was going to talk A LOT about Kiwi Magazine's new edition and so it continues today. I LOVED the article about green spring cleaning! (I linked the Mom's Meet shortened article.) It goes through each room in the house and talks about how to clean it, greenly. There are also some DIY green cleaner recipes at the back (mostly just baking soda and vinegar!) (All Purpose Cleaner: 2 tsp borax, 1/4 C white vinegar, 4C hot water, 1/2 tsp lemon oil for antibacterial. 2 drops pine oil to disinfect and deodorize, and 2 drops of dish soap. Mix and spray!)

I was SUPER excited about what I THOUGHT was yet another database, like the cosmetic database. Sadly, it's not. It's through Whole Foods, and it's just a Eco-Scale rating system that rates the products that they carry. Like the Homeland Security Alert levels, they're color coded from red, orange, yellow and green. Method was listed as orange and yellow and the ones that were all green I had never heard of before...why don't WE get a Whole Foods around here?!? The good thing is that it DOES tell what ingredients to look out for in any cleaning product so you can compare what you have at home and see it's "threat level".

I do have to share one more thing from the article. Under "Bedroom" they talk about cleaning the mattress. If course you're supposed to wash all the linens (in hot water to kill dust mites) but to actually clean the mattress, you're supposed to drag it outside and beat it with a broom. As much fun as my kids would have with that, I don't think I'm going to be able to manage that just now. So the other options...have the kids jump on it to bring the dust to the surface then vacuum! Why didn't my mom read this when I was little?!?!