Buy a Straw Cleaner and Save Your Sanity

This post is NOT endorsed by any company. I truly love these products and want to share them with you. 

Do you know what my kids have an absolute ton of?

Cups. Sippy cups, cups with built in straws, pop up cups, promotional cups. I have so. many. cups.

Guess what I also have?

Straws of my own. I received these amazing Pioneer Woman reusable straws as a Christmas gift THREE YEARS AGO and I'm still using them and I adore them. I love them because they allow me to drink like a normal human being without spilling (ahem, something I am apparently not capable of without a straw) yet I'm not harming the environment with hundreds of plastic straws a year.

You can even see one here, in my post on Peach Sweet Tea!

What I didn't have was a way to clean those awesome straws. And, after 3 years of continual running through the dishwasher, it just wasn't getting the job done. I wanted to deep clean those suckers. Enter these amazing straw cleaners.

I was able to clean my awesome Pioneer Woman straws, and now they're nice and clean. I squirted a little dawn on the straw brush, ran it through the straw from both ends, swished it around, rinsed...and then put it in the dishwasher too, because I really want to kill ALL the germs and my dishwasher has a sanitize cycle that puts my mind at ease.

The real power of these straw cleaners wasn't just on my straws. I whipped out the kids cups with straws and was able to clean not only the straw, but the mouthpiece too.

Y'all, the horror. Truly, the horror. The white straw cleaner came out black. BLACK. Some of that was residue from chocolate milk. But I know some of it was dead mold that had just been sitting in those straws, unbeknownst to me or my kiddos. Ewwwww. You just can't unsee that.

Of course I then cleaned every straw and mouthpiece in the dang house, because now I knew. And once you know, you must clean, clean, clean.

If my hands hadn't been covered in soap, I'd have filmed it to show you. It's insane. And super gross.

These straw cleaners are definitely the best thing I've purchased this year. I KNOW. It's $5 and it earns that title, because now I know my kid's (and me) are drinking through super clean straws.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. 

Knoxville Moms Blog Post: Daniel Tiger Made Me a Better Mom

Once upon a time I had a two-year-old and a newborn and I was slowly but surely losing my mind. Then we discovered Daniel Tiger on PBS Kids and I watched Mom Tiger with her endless patience and kindness and I felt like the biggest failure, and the worst mom, in the whole wide world.

Want to read more? Check out my latest KMB post, Daniel Tiger Made Me a Better Mom.

Bathroom Update for less than $60

Once upon a time, we walked into a gorgeous, spotlessly clean house. Then we bought it. Then it started falling apart.

The reason it was spotlessly clean is because it was freshly painted and then no one lived here. So when we began, you know, living in our house, that paint didn't hold up too well. It turns out it was a matte finish, which shows every. single. smudge. And the whole house is painted in it. Short of buying stock in Mr. Clean's Magic Erasers and driving myself crazy with constant wall cleaning, painting seemed like the best option. But in most spaces, I've hung photos and placed furniture and y'all, I just don't want to paint my whole dang house.

But the bathroom. Oh, the bathroom. It's our only full bathroom upstairs, and it's in the hall, so visitors use it too. We have a lot of little ones through here, and well, they just aren't that great at washing their hands yet. Or at least my little ones aren't. So we had a huge swath of area under the light switch which was a lovely shade of almost-washed-off-dirt. Regardless of how many Magic Erasers I used, it was tinted from all my scrubbing.

Before

So one day, I snapped.

I went to Lowe's, taped two paint chips on the wall for a week, returned to Lowe's, and purchased a gallon of Valspar paint in Lei Flower ($36 before a $10 rebate I'm still waiting on). I also bought an edging tool. I cleaned and taped and cleared out the bathroom. I use Dollar Tree shower curtain liners as drop cloths, so I laid those down.

Then I put on some tunes, and painted.

And painted.

And painted.

I was extremely sweaty and my playlist was just about out of music, but I was finally finished.

Oh, and all of this took place in a single day while my oldest was at Kindergarten and my youngest got to have way more than usual TV time.

After showering and lunching with my youngest, we headed to the car pick up line so he could nap. We picked up big brother, and headed to Target for a new shower curtain.

Lei Flower was a little brighter than I anticipated, and my butterfly shower curtain (purchased at least 14 years ago) was just a little too feminine paired with it. But I knew a nice gray would even it out, and wouldn't you know I'd just seen a gorgeous shower curtain at Target the other day and it was currently 20% off?

After!

Total Cost:
Paint- $36
Edging tool: $3
Shower Curtain: $14
Tiny Paintbrush- $1

I already had painting supplies like rollers, brushes, a paint tray, my Dollar Store drop cloths, and my trusty painter's tape.

After

I'm not totally done; I'd like to paint the vanity a gray to match the shower curtain and frame out the mirror. It turns out, life isn't like an HGTV show. The whole project doesn't always get done in one go. We were able to do this small project by doing just part of it, and now I don't cringe when I walk into the bathroom. Now walking into my bathroom makes me happy, instead of stressing me out. And that makes the work and expense totally worth it.