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A truly hoopless, shiny and streak-free giveaway

I painted this rabbit. I love how it turned out.

It’s very Valentine’s Day friendly, which I hadn’t set out to do when I created it during a Mile High Mamas night out at Arvada’s Into the Fire pottery painting studio.

The evening, packed with good friends, good food, and permission to go crazy with a paintbrush, was sponsored by Windex. They wanted to share Windex Multi-Surface Vinegar Cleaner with The Mamas.

I’ve already used half of the bottle they bestowed on me. I tend to go nuts with my trigger finger, especially when the results shine and smell fresh.

Windex would love to send one of you the same delightful gift basket they gave to us. It includes:

1. A six-paneled photo frame

2. A canvas-covered organization tote

3. A bottle of Windex Multi-Surface Vinegar Cleaner

All you have to do is leave a comment telling me about a grody mess you’ve had to clean. Or you could tell me about a mess you made. I dropped a gallon of milk in our driveway this morning. Split wide open, it did.

There are no hoops to jump through. You don’t have to follow me or my blog or my Facebook page or my Twitter account. You don’t have to Tweet or bleat or go anywhere else or do a darn thing but leave a comment.

IN FACT, if I find out anyone has Tweeted or put this on Facebook or anything, you’ll be disqualified. The more you advertise the giveaway, the less chances you have to win. It’s MY JOB to promote all this stuff.

Not yours.

I will leave the contest open until Tuesday, February 8th at noon, mountain standard time. It ships anywhere in the US. Also, if you’ve never left a comment or have changed your contact info since your last comment, it will go to moderation. Don’t fret if you don’t see it right away.

I anxiously await your stories of messiness.

38 comments to A truly hoopless, shiny and streak-free giveaway

  • The worst one for me was after my fall cleaning this past year … after spending two straight days getting the house sparkling, I was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted when I heard my mostly potty-trained little one get up. I rushed to help her find the bathroom in the dark and stepped right into a large puddle. At the top of the stairs. At midnight. After I had been cleaning for two days.

    I managed not to swear, but it was difficult.

    (And may I say just how much I love you for banning people from promoting this? Nothing turns me off a giveaway quicker than finding I have to publicly brand myself a “fan,” even if I AM a fan. Grr.)

  • Once, when Tyler was little, he dumped an entire jug of laundry detergent into the carpet of our rented apartment. Who would thing it would be so hard to clean up something that was meant for cleaning?

    I promise, cross my heart hope to die, that I did NOT bleat about this giveaway. That cracked me up by the way. “Tweet or bleat”

  • Your bunny turned out beautifully! And I love the way you photographed the goodies in the goody basket.

    Would love to do it again with you sometime.

    (P.S. I disqualify myself for the giveaway.)

  • Sign me up! Probably the worst messes I can recall are the poop-smeared-on-wall ones, courtesy of Anja when she was two. So. Gross.

  • The last big mess I had to clean was a week ago. My grandson had a messy accident in his pants. The little darling decided to help his grandma out by taking off his clothes and putting them in the washer-even turning it on. The problem was, he put them in the dryer. The dryer where his clothes were drying from an earlier mess.

    My brand, spanking new dryer was covered in poop.

    P.S. I use windex for everything. I even use it for the ants that file into my house when someone leaves crumbs on the floor.

  • Rika

    My son was getting ready for school and had already put on his snow pants and boots when he decided he needed to use the toilet. Unfortunately, his snow pants didn’t get pushed down very far and, in fact, started riding up when he was in the middle of peeing. The snow pants caused his, um, aim to be totally off and there was a huge puddle on the lid of the toilet tank. And behind the toilet.

  • The last really big mess I’ve had to clean up was at our table where my kids sit to eat. Somehow we forgot to wipe it after our last meal before going out of town, and that gunk just dried on there and became like concrete.

  • My uckiest mess it’s actually cleaning the dog’s kennel.

    LOVE the bunny!!

  • Amy

    The worst mess I have ever had to clean up was a container of orange juice concentrate (the stuff from the freezer section) that had apparently rolled out of the bag and under the back seat (I drive a Suburban). It was July, in the South. I never noticed that the o.j. was missing.

    A week later, I began to notice a horrible smell in the car whenever we would climb in. After a lot of searching, I finally found the culprit. The o.j. concentrate had become rancid, exploding the end off of the container. The nasty mess had poured out all over the carpet. The smell was so horrible and the mess so bad that the only solution was to cut out the carpet under the back seat.

    It was years before I could stand the smell of orange juice.

  • Oh please don’t let me win… We live far too far away for prizes… But I have to share our capital mess!!! In the olden days when we had but one itty bitty child, we decided to get him some playmates… Hubs is allergic to cats and I am too lazy to walk a dog… so the OBVIOUS choice was two goldfish aptly named “mango and pip.” Needless to say pip popped it on the first night and was flushed away before breakfast and Mango decided to survive no matter what… Of course we kept the tank at toddler eye-level, we were baby friendly after all… in a moment of passive parenting junior decided to feed the fish… Well do you know what is in those little flakes of fish food… smaller flaked fish and a pinch every couple of days is one thing but a jar carefully sprinkled on to every item of furnishing, under cushions, stomped through carpets and sprinkled behind curtains, carefully layered throughout the bookcases and flecked through the leaves of dozens of books… It was a rental house of course!!! None of our furniture of course!!!! We moved of course!!! And decided to never have pets again… we would much rather get our kidlet a couple of siblings and we never looked back!!!

    I can think of another one: In the golden olden days before we had kids we went to Rome on vacation and my Italian lecturer offered us a month in Rome in her very chic and vintage apartment on Campo Fiori… very central, very fashionable, very Italy… Well hubs picked up a “little balloon head” pavement toy… a balloon filled with flour and a funny face drawn on the front… shift the flour for different expressions… shift, shift, very funny, shift, shift, squish, oops… I turned around to see him sitting in a cloud of flour… on an ancient and obviously frightfully expensive chair covered in priceless corded fabric – navy of course!!! Great potential parent that I was, I knew it was time for a time-out, so I stepped outdoors onto the balcony, which was smaller than a tea tray, to catch my breath and turned around to discover he was “helping” to clean up… He was vacuuming the chair… but it was not a vacuum, it was a floor polisher with a nice metal brush on it, for making those ancient roman floors extra shiny… so after carefully hooking the fabric to distraction, I mentioned he should do nothing, and I step out onto the balcony and clung to the ancient pillar while hyperventilating… He was so distressed by my distress that he got a bowl of water and a cloth and started wiping it clean… At which stage I stepped back into the room and died… to see a beautiful chair carefully recovered in the relics of a cat fight and smeared in flour paste… I knew then that time-out just doesn’t work. And my kids have been saved that ordeal.

    Hope you all have a fabulous mess-free weekend!!!

  • Bethany

    I’m kinda sad because I don’t know that I’ve ever made a big mess. : ( What can I say – I’m single, no kids, live alone…thinking, thinking…oh, I’ve got it. I got quite ill while in Kenya as a teenager. After using the “facilites” and missing the hole (it was a squat pot and have you ever tried to aim diarrhea?!), I went back later to wash it down. Sorry if that was TMI! ; )

  • Amy

    My oldest 2 kids have both had issues with night-time toilet accidents. As in they get up half asleep and in their stupor cannot determine which household item is the toilet. Unfortunately they generally choose incorrectly. But who doesn’t love cleaning up urine at 2 am? 🙂

  • We’ve had problems the past few months with the cat not peeing her litterbox. It’s been on the floor beside her box, or worse, down the vent.

    Sigh, if I didn’t love her so much…

  • NTE

    I love the part about not tweeting, says she with no twitter. Once, my nephew dumped an entire bottle of powder on the floor, and it was, by far the largest mess I’ve ever tried to clean. Luckily, my brother was supposed to be in charge, so I just let him give it the full attack.

  • Val G.

    Did you make that red bunny in honor of Chinese New year? It’s the year of the rabbit and red is a prominent color in the holiday.

    The worst mess I’ve had to clean up (more than once) has been when my husband leaves cans of soda in the freezer. They explode and get in all the nooks and crannies of the freezer drawers and shelves and all over our frozen foods.

  • I’m potty training. That has made for many grody messes. And many more to come.

  • Cute bunny! Love the model for your prizes! 🙂

    Once, to save time, I decided to wash a canvas bag. I was pregnant with my daughter, and the thought of standing at the sink and scrubbing the bag seemed daunting. I popped it into the washer and then into the dryer. When I got it out of the dryer, I realized I’d left a ballpoint pen in the outside pocket of it. It was all over the bag AND the inside of my dryer. I spent HOURS scrubbing.

    Now, THAT was a huge time-saver, huh??

    Ugh!

  • MamaLiz

    I am probably not eligible, but…my biggest mess was this one time at my sis-in-law’s house. She and her hubby were at the hospital delivering baby #4 and my new hubby and I were called into Aunt and Uncle duty! I will leave names unmentioned, but perhaps Miss Lifenut knows what I am talking about. A certain Youngling #3 and a diaper full of #2. A whole pack of wipes, several washrags, scrubbed walls, changed crib sheets, a bath for him, and a shower for each of us and “Voila!” – all clean! Still ranks as my biggest mess, but I love the little guy and would do it all again… or maybe not.

  • Yesterday morning I had to leave for work really early. I got up and went to nurse Judah. When I got to his room I noticed that there was a perfect arc of bright purple puke surrounding him. On the sheet, in his hair, and covering his pajamas. He had blueberries for dinner the night before. Apparently the GI bug wasn’t completely out of his system.

  • Jeana

    We didn’t hear our dogs urgent whinings to go outside in the middle of the night. Later we found out that one of the kids had fed her bell peppers because he decided “she needs to eat more healthy”. I won’t describe just how bad my living room carpet looked and smelled that morning, but I bet you can imagine.

  • Amber

    The most difficult mess I’ve ever had to clean up was made by me *before* I had my four kids! In fact, I was huge preggo with the triplets and probably extra clumsy when I dropped a full bottle of olive oil on my kitchen tile floor. It broke, went everywhere and was SO HARD to clean! Not only do oil and water not mix, but neither does cleaning it on hands and knees while “with children”! It was good practice for what was to come with them though! 🙂

  • You are awesome. That is all. And the biggest mess I’ve had to clean up this week is one in which the ten minute rush before school lent itself to some less than kind words on behalf of both me and a certain member of my family.

    No sure Windex can help with that.

  • edj

    Oh I like your requirements! 🙂 And I love how your rabbit turned out too.
    Messes. I will tell you about a funny one. Elliot was about 3, and we LOVED the Curious George books. (The original ones) We had been enjoying the one where George spills the ink and then pours a whole box of sudsy soap on it to clean it up. One morning I got up to puddles of vanilla (ink) all over the kitchen floor, with a lone ballpoint pen floating forlornly in the middle of the biggest one. He had dumped out the dishwasher soap too. It wasn’t too horrible to clean up, and the kitchen smelled…interesting…and I have to admit I loved his response to literature! This was also the period where every morning the race was on–would I rescue the newspaper before he threw it into the bathtub? (a la when C Geo makes the papers into boats…)

  • Melanie

    No crazy messes jump to mind, but the footprints (and dog prints) from all the ice melt over the past few weeks are driving me crazy!!!

  • Daria Mann

    I tried to prevent one giant mess last Wednesday and failed! I was working at school since church staff had to work on a school snow day when a leak sprung in the hallway by the entrance. I had lived through a flood caused by the pesky fire sprinkers once before and thought I would try to turn the water off before another flood happened. After calling several people to get help and leaving messages, I went in the boiler room and pulled the big red handle turning off the water to the building. Bummer it turned off the regular water, but not the fire sprinkers. Another try, trace the pipes while getting advice from my husband Steve. Sprinker pipes found! Yellow handle? Are you sure? I pulled it down and oil sprayed all over my hair, face, and all over my clothes. Yeah, Gloria is here too! I told Bethany to go in the gym (thank goodness she wasn’t standing in the hallway!)and asked Gloria to help me find the main line to turn off. Suddenly the fire alarm goes off and a flood begins! We get out the church side as water pours into the building heading down the hill straight into the ELC. Now, two classrooms are closed, service master is to the rescue with their fans blowing everywhere trying to dry it, and the contractors are trying to figure out how to prevent this from happening again. I just wish Windex could clean my very oil stained pink sweatshirt!

  • Gretchen – I don’t have a messy story to share but have you seen the new diaper commercial for heavy DOOTY leaks? Where the babies grunt and fill the diaper with “dooty”??? I literally fell off the couch watching this… I think it’s for Luvs diapers…. watch for it – it’s appallingly funny!

  • Penny

    The most recent mess I made…I dropped an open can of ground pepper. It went everywhere. I was sneezing and trying my best to clean it all up, about ten minutes before the guests were to arrive. I am still finding stray pepper here and there! It isn’t easy to clean up!

  • Kimberly Busby

    My best mess ever was created a few years ago when I was making snacks for my son’s pirate themed birthday party. I had filled a clean fishbowl with blue jello and swedish candy fish and was putting in in the fridge to gel. Something went wrong and I ended up spilling/dropping the whole thing onto the floor. It splashed onto the cabinets, flowed under the fridge, just got everywhere! I bravely cleaned up and started again. Can you believe I spilled the second batch too? Uggg! Finally got it into the fridge safely on take three.

  • Heidi

    The biggest Mess I’ve ever made was when I was about 15, I dropped a glass jar about 32 oz of mustard onto the concrete floor of the kitchen.

    but the hardest mess to clean up was when my boys spilled a whole bottle of shampoo on the hall carpet. I thought I’d gotten it cleaned up but months later that one spot in the carpet attracted so much dirt I decided to use the carpet shampooer on it. it filled the hall with bubbles before I remembered what had caused that dirt spot.

  • Oh boy. I almost never sign up for giveaways, but messes are my thing. (ooh, that’s kind of sad.)
    My favorite ME mess is neatly summarized in two words. Ketchup + temper. It was my temper getting the best of me and while arguing, I grabbed the ketchup from the fridge and slammed it down on the countertop. Unfortunately, the top was not secured (plastic squeeze bottle) and the resulting blast (truly, the bottle somehow exploded, expunging more that half a bottle over my kitchen) left me scrubbing ketchup from hidden places for weeks to come. It got behind the fridge, the stove and between the counters. It was on the walls, the POPCORN ceiling, and the fronts of everything. Some of it managed to take a hard left and squeeze through the doorframe to visit the dining room.

    Did you know that wiping down partially dried ketchup is eerily reminiscent of blood?

    I thought I thoroughly cleaned, but no lie, I was finding ketchup stains for weeks, in the most random and unexpected places. I’d sort through the mail to find that there were drops on envelopes, firmly cementing the date of the henceforth-known-as “ketchup disaster”. There are still jokes and prods whenever I go near a bottle of the stuff, but the biggest impact was that the disaster was the last time I actually ATE ketchup. You clean up that mess and then see if you’re inclined to ingest it in the future.

    Red ketchup/Ivory furnishings. It really doesn’t get more poetic that that.

  • Robin M.

    I dropped a box of rice crispies just the other morning… upside down – and they went everywhere!!!

  • Mandi

    The biggest mess I’ve had to clean up so far (we’re only up to three kids) would have to be when I tried a little too hastily to redirect the vomit coming from my three year old. I caught some with my hands, some with my arms, and most of it with the sides, back, top, and lid of the toilet. Very little of it found it’s way into the toilet, surprisingly enough.

  • Bleating…hehe! So funny!

    Ok, the latest mess around here was the apple juice on the floor. I thought what my 2yo had spilled was a glass of water, so I left it to dry while I did other things that morning. Then, when I stepped in it that afternoon and my foot released from the floor with a sticky screech I knew I should have payed more attention. It took three moppings to get it all up. Ugh!

  • Hil

    Our garbage can is between the kitchen counter and the fridge. The side of the fridge catches all of the disgusting, drippy food garbage. It is SO lovely to clean!

  • Three boys, two boston terriers, and one husband. Nuff said. 🙂 If a mess exists….I’ve cleaned it….our latest catastrophe was an entire quart jar of homemade sweet pickles leaped off the shelf and died a horrible death on our linoleum floor. It was horrible. Not to mention the fact that it ran across the floor and somehow found the hole in the floor where the water tube for the ice-maker goes thru and down to the basement…..so when I went to load the wood stove there was a HUGE puddle of sticky-vinegary pickle juice there as well. Mixed in w/ash, wood chips, bark dust…you name it. My kids squawked every time we walked in the house, “I STILL SMELL PICKLES!!!!” LOL. I can laugh now.

  • Shelley

    A cube of butter in brand new carpeting as we were trying to sell our house. Courtesy of my not quite 2yo at the time. With 6 kids I’m sure there is more (gross ones) but that one stands out right at the moment. I think the grossest I have read is the dirty diaper in the dryer. BLECH!

  • Melissa

    Please disqualify me on the basis of family familiarity. I wanted to share anyway because I know most new moms would identify. When Pierce was just about a week old my husband went back to work and my mom went back home. I woke up with him in the morning after having little sleep because he ate every two hours. I went to change his diaper and low and behold he had projectile poop that ended up all over him, me and the bed. I just sat there and cried for several minutes before I could compose myself. I guess this was my payback for constantly finger painting on my wall using my diaper when I was little

  • Gretchen von Lifenut

    COMMENTS ARE CLOSED. THE CONTEST IS OVER. THE SHIP HAS SAILED. TURN OUT THE LIGHTS. WINNER WILL BE RANDOMLY SELECTED ASAP.

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