Clean Mean Erasing Machine!

With two very active boys, I'm not a huge fan of the phone. On the rare occasion that I do make the mistake of picking it up during waking hours, all hell breaks loose. Immediately, my house is filled with the sounds of screams and crashes. When visions of your children wrestling with lamps are the only images that could possible fit the clamor going on in the next room, it's hard to remain cheerful and attentive with the person on the other line. Occasionally, however, I've tried to converse while one child was sleeping and the other pleasantly distracted with a hundred piece puzzle. 

HA! That actually doesn't happen here. 

One day, Zip was sleeping, and I thought that Tizzy was satisfactorily distracted, so I called my neighbor. After we’d talked for about fifteen minutes, I became eerily aware of a profound silence. 

“Something is definitely not right,” I said. “Let me call you back.”

“Tizzy?” I called.

“In here, Mama,” he replied pleasantly from the far reaches of the bathroom.

I opened the door, and our creamy white bathroom was now brilliant shades of orange, fuschia, purple, blue, turquoise and red. 

I stood there stunned as I took it all in. He smiled at me, pleased with his artwork. Not a single surface had been neglected. In his hands were two micro-thin pens and on the walls, the toilet, the bathtub, the cabinets, and even the mirror, were skinny, squiggly lines, infinitely spiraling upward toward the far reaches of wherever his lithe little body could reach.

While I’m all for expressionistic art, we rent our house, and I’m ultimately hoping to reclaim our deposit, though that’s looking more and more doubtful each day.

When I first discovered Mr. Clean Magic Erasers, I was more than a bit skeptical. When it comes to cleaning products, I’m more of a lemon, baking soda, and vinegar gal, so I found it hard to believe that these dense white sponges could be so effective without being horribly poisonous. Yet, there are no warnings of toxicity, only against harm due to abrasion. Showing them to my husband, he determined they must be a made of a magical micro-fiber, to which I said, “Hallelujah!” 

Fortunately, I had one in my cabinet, and, if the darn thing hadn’t warned against handling by toddlers (due to abrasion), he’d have had as marvelous a time erasing his masterpiece as he’d had creating it.

We’ve also had the pleasure of erasing a pencil-etched “storm” in the hallway, ball point, pen graffiti tags on my mom’s computer screen, and endless footprints marched across the boys bedroom wall.

Now, I’m thinking that, as long as they don’t throw a rock through the window or kick a hole through the wall, our deposit may, in fact, be safe after all, thanks to Mr. Clean.