The other morning, I walked into the downstairs bathroom that is pretty much the domain of Edie.  There I noticed peeking behind the shower curtain, a Hello Kitty bath toy perched on the spout of the tub.  I wanted to capture it in a still life – my first thought was I admit, to post it on instagram, like the purple duckie shot from a few weeks ago.  Only unlike the purple duckie on top of the soap dish, any shot I attempted to get of Hello Kitty seemed to  spotlight the funk of the tub.

I am the first to admit to my lax cleaning habits. Cleaning the house is always the last thing I will do – there are just so many hours in the day and so many other things to do.  And lately, Edie has taken ownership of cleaning that bathroom, doing a darn good job in the process.  Or so I thought.

Turns out while the sink & other fixtures have been kept up, the tub has a curtain you can pull shut to avoid seeing any unpleasantries.  And unpleasantries there were.  It wasn’t just a ring around the tub, the entire bottom of it seemed to be coated in a layer of what appeared to be hay & glitter.  Glitter?  That child off-gasses glitter.  It’s everywhere, including my car.  Hay?  I haven’t the foggiest.

Over Christmas break, our family spent days on end cleaning the house as a team.  In fact, I’m pretty sure our combined efforts are what brought on the polar vortex – parts of the house hadn’t been that clean in eons.  Both bathrooms had been scrubbed & moppped within an inch of their lives, leaving the state of the downstairs tub that much more of a mystery.  How does it get so funky so fast when it’s been too cold to go outside?

Yesterday morning, having broken out the big guns of my cleaning supplies (yes, I do have them, I just don’t always use them), Edie found me scrubbing out her shower.  Upon asking what inspired me, I admitted that I had wanted to instagram the Hello Kitty on the faucet, but the tub was so gross I had to clean it before I could take a shot I could post.  Yes, the internet made me clean the house.  The power of technology at work.