Money-Wise Mondays - Cleaning the house

Homemade cleaners are gentle on
our kids and the environment

   Keeping the house clean with three monkeys is a job for more than one tired, pregnant mom. It's also a job that nobody in our house wants to do, except for me. I really like to have things tidy and organized and I thrive in an environment that is well put together. If you ever have seen TV show Friends you would easily associate me with Monica Geller. In my days before kids I would spend one day a week, after work, cleaning our apartment top to bottom. Before we got married, Daddy and I lived in a 700 square foot apartment, and we were rarely home. That did not stop me from scrubbing everything every week. We didn't even eat at home that often as I worked shift work and we went out often. But you could never even find a speck of dust or dirt in our apartment, thanks to my 4 hour cleaning regime!
   Fast forward 10 years and my house sometimes looks like a bomb hit it. There is definitely nothing better to curing someone of obsessive cleaning than having kids. Not to say that having kids is an excuse not to do any housework, but in reality, cleaning a house where kids live is equivalent to washing your car before you take it 4x4ing in the mud.

Money-Wise Mondays! - Castile Soap

   Today I would like to review a product that saves our family a lot of money. About 5 years ago I have stumbled, purely by accident, onto castile soap. I have been looking for more natural altarnatives to drugstore soaps for a while and I came upon few websites recommending castile soap. At this point I had no clue as to what castile soap was but I set out on a mission to find out. After searching in our local natural health stores I came upon Dr. Bronner's Organic Pure Castile Liquid Soap . I bought it that day and went home to do more research. It looked like just plain ol' liquid soap, but what was it really? I have long since stopped trusting the word "natural" on the package, because most companies will use it nilly-willy to sell their product, even if it's not really "natural". But after a bit more research I found out that castile soaps are made by mixing organic oils with alkali (potassium hydroxide) which reacts with oil to form soap. There are no waste products of this binding, and soaps are natural and chemical free. I was intrigued! One thing I also found out that castile soap is very concentrated and should be diluted with water for most uses on the body.
   So fast forward to today, and our family uses it for many applications.