How to REALLY clean your bathroom

1. Make sure you have a large number of half-full bottles of various liquid or semi-liquid items including, but not limited to, moisturizing hand soap, foam hand soap, Comet scrub cleaner, facial wash, Baby Shampoo, Cheap "kids" lotion, expensive "mom" lotion. All must be in varying colors and levels of fullness.

2. Get heavily involved in a project online (e.g. photo scrapbook) that has a deadline and then have something (as it invariably does) work not right.

3. Give your 3-year-old LOTS of juice/milk/water, in any combination and/or all three just about an hour before your are neck deep in your online project.

4. Turn loose the walking almost-1-year-old who loves to make a beeline upstairs to the bathroom when her bigger sister is there.

Now, the 3-year-old will finish going potty for the umpteenth time (which you have come to ignore because you've check the last 10 times). You hear the water turn on/off, and you think in the back of your mind somewhere, "Oh, good, she washed her hands" and you promptly ignore any further water sounds.

Fast forward about 20 minutes and this is what you'll find:

The baby is covered in Comet, which is sticking to her clothes because the 3-year-old has dripped some water off the sink (more to come on this in a moment). She is also surrounded by unopened (THANK GOODNESS!)bottles of nail polish, plus cotton balls, hair pins, barrettes, hair rubber bands, and pretty much everything else in the cupboard next to the sink. This will solve your clutter problem that was a nightmare monster hiding in the cupboard next to the sink. It also helps with those stains that were in the now-Comet-covered jeans (bleach gets most everything out- especially color). After dusting the baby off and tossing everything she drug out into the garbage, you change her and turn to the 3-year-old who is standing at the sink with six soaked washcloths, and a handful of swirly pink-purple-pearl-clear "Potion" in her hands. Help her wash her hands and then scoot her out of the bathroom with the order to change her soaked clothes and get into bed for rest time. Of course, she's compliant since she is worried; you hear her say, "Mom? You're not mad at me?"

And you aren't, yet. You knew you were courting disaster when you ignored the water sound. And, hey, not too much damage, right? Well, you go to wipe up the water puddle under the step-stool next to the sink that the 3-year-old managed to spill half-way across the floor, which didn't quite reach the 1-year-old (who is also now in her bed wearing fresh clothes and still smells a little like Comet). Lo! and Behold! It wasn't water... it is 1/2 a bottle of clear liquid hand soap that has been POURED out onto the floor down the cupboard door.

So, you have now de-cluttered the cupboard, thoroughly washed the sink with a wide variety of soaps, and by the time you get the sticky suds off, you could serve dinner on the bathroom floor tonight because it's absolutely germ free.

And, that, my friends, is how you get a bathroom really clean.

**No, sorry, there are no pictures to accompany this post.Amazingly, the mess didn't look too bad and I really didn't want to show off the contents of my scary-monster-containing cupboard.