Snakes in a Bathroom ... The Movie

I have a confession.

I hate to clean bathrooms. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE clean bathrooms. Believe it or not, I actually prefer clean bathrooms to dirty ones. ... It's really true.

But I would love it if bathrooms magically cleaned themselves. There is something about getting on my hands and knees and scrubbing away at the residue filth of bathrooms that just gives me the heebie jeebies. So I avoid it like the plague. Well, I don't entirely avoid it. We don't live like animals ... for the most part. But I content myself with light touchup work rather than the hardcore scrubbing that a bathroom really needs. Most of the time that is enough. The bathrooms stay relatively clean and odor free, and Team Blau is happy.

I'd like to think that I am a happy cleaner ... like this lovely lady:

But in reality I'm more like this one:

Okay, I'm not really like her. ... I don't have a baby to carry everywhere ... but having teenagers is almost the same, I think. 

Well today my cleaning demons came home to roost.

I have three boys (four if you count Herman, and I probably should for this post). And I have four girls (and I will not count myself for this one), and girls can be just as bathroom messy, if not more, than boys. We have three bathrooms in our house, and the middle hall bathroom is the one that seems to get the most use from everyone. And with so many kids using the bathroom throughout the day a gentle drive-by cleaning just isn't going to cut it. Yesterday was my Day of Reckoning. As I walked by the bathroom over and over yesterday during the day I could smell the dirtiness. You know that antiseptic smell that greets you every time you enter a hospital? You know, the smell of bleach and clean? Well, this was the exact opposite of that smell. It hadn't quite reached "dead animal hidden in the wall" smell, but it was headed in that direction.

And for a situation like that I have to pull out my old favorite to show my reaction:



I was done. I had reached the point of no return. I could go no further living in a house with a bathroom like that. Do I hate cleaning bathrooms? Yes. But I hate smelling bathrooms WAY more, so the day would not end until that bathroom was clean. So I headed to Lowe's and bought the most powerful cleaners in their collection. The kids headed to bed, and I got to work.

I donned my hazmat suit:

You think I jest, but I'm serious here. There was some serious nastiness going on in that bathroom. I covered up.

And then I scrubbed. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. I polished and scraped and filed and did whatever I could to eliminate every single nasty germ out of that room.

I was feeling good. Accomplished. The bathroom was glistening as I headed for my last task of the night. The nasty, nasty bathtub. Okay, it wasn't totally nasty. It looked relatively clean on the surface. But lurking, far below my natural eyes was a hazard I could have only imagined in my nightmares. And trust me, this will probably star in my nightmares for many years to come.

As I was scrubbing the tub floor I noticed a little bit of hair sticking out of the drain. Just a little bit, but with so many long haired beauties using this bathroom I knew that there was a lot of hair shedding going on, so I decided to reach into the drain and grab what I could. Thank all that is holy that I was wearing super thick latex gloves because what appeared may haunt me for the rest of my days. I grabbed onto the edge of the hair and began to pull. And pull. And pull. And pull. I was like a firefighter, pulling a hose from its resting place. When I finally got to the end of the line I had pulled out a hairball that was one and a half feet long and one inch in diameter. It looked like a gigantic hair snake. I really should have taken a picture of it, but I was on the verge of casting up my crumpets and ruining my newly sanitized bathroom. It was DISGUSTING. Since I don't have a picture I will just have to give you an approximate replication of what it looked like:

It even had that very serious young man attached to it. That's how gigantic this ball of hair was. Ewwwwwwwwww!

Needless to say, now that tub water is draining much faster.

Finally, at around 12:30 am I climbed into my very comfortable bed, content with knowing that I had a sparkling clean and odor free bathroom ... for at least six more hours. 

Today the battle to keep it clean begins ... and I will lose it, I know. But like I always say, Life is a Marathon, Not a Sprint. I may lose this battle today, but one day I am going to win that war. 

Today, at least, I will devote much of my day to giving great thanks for being born at a time when heavy plastic gloves exist. 

Oh drat! I hate that this is true!