So, recently my husband and I bought our first ever high end vacuum cleaner. We'd been making do on the $40 sale upright I'd gotten in college. I don't even like cleaning, but I was excited. We did our first room and loved watching the bin fill up an embarrassing number of times in just that first room.
The next morning the children went to preschool and I was still excited enough about the new vacuum cleaner to decide that spending some of my precious "me" time vacuuming was recreational in nature and I moved on to the berber carpet in the living room. I was humming along happily vacuuming when I met my first snag. Someone really should have warned me about what would happen when high-end vacuum cleaner meets an exposed loop in a berber carpet. A fraction of a second was all it took and I ended up with this:
At first I simply stared at the torn carpet and tried to process exactly what had happened. Then I tipped back the vacuum cleaner and stared in amazement at the long piece of carpet wound around the beater bar. Then I texted my husband because I couldn't stand being amazed all by myself. Finally I removed the pulled up carpet from the beater bar saving it so that my husband could appreciate it too when he came home and resumed vacuuming.
Because I want you all to think that I have a super fast learning curve I won't mention that after cleaning up all the mess from the first snag I promptly went over a second loop in the carpet and repeated the entire mistake causing an additional strip of torn carpeting. At that point, I did take a pair of scissors and go over the carpet on my hands and knees to trim any remaining snags before finishing vacuuming.
I suppose I could be upset about it, but in the big scheme of things, there are so many "better" things to spend that mental energy on that I'd just rather see the humor in the situation. I didn't like that carpet much anyway. And the two new rips will match the ketchup stain from the day I let the children eat in front of the tv nicely.
Lesson Learned the Hard Way: Number Two
So, cloud dough is amazing stuff. It is inexpensive, easy to make from two ingredients you have around the house, smells nice, and is fun to play with.
Do not, under any circumstances, put it in an outdoor sensory table.
Oh, sure, it all looks beautiful and pristine in the picture. And yes, the children did play in it happily for over an hour. But then I forgot it in the rush to make lunch and get the children down for nap. To make things worse, I hadn't even put the top on the sand table. And then it rained. Flour, oil, and now water were in the sand table.
I might have rescued the situation had I noticed and dealt with it at that point, but we had several busy days. So it sat there in the hot sun for another couple of days and then got some more rain. Then I went out on the deck yesterday and it was the smell that hit me first. It's really difficult to describe. Fermenting maybe? And so not in a good way. And it was a paste that was just stuck to the many surfaces of the sand table. It took at least a couple of hours of work to clean that mess up. And we had to toss all the sand on the other side because the children, blissfully unaware of how nasty it was, managed to mix a bunch of the fermented cloud dough in with the sand.
I think I can still smell that stuff on my hands. From now on, the cloud dough is exclusively an indoor activity.
Lessons learned. My personal theme of the week.
