When I was growing up, we didn't worry so much about killing trees and catalogs came in the mail a-plenty. My favorite catalog, by far, was the Lillian Vernon catalog. I guess it was the variety that kept my interest. A quick google search found that Lillian is still going strong; she kept up with the times and went online.
One day, when looking through my mom's newest catalog, I saw a cookbook with 101 ways to cook zucchini. Not wanting to find those little green specks in anything else my mother cooked, I found myself a black marker and carefully placed a nice big X over that product and in my best typewriter looking handwriting wrote, "Out of Stock."
One day, another item caught my eye. It was a little soap squisher, invented so that you never again had to waste that tiny little end of the soap. My mom, being the thrifty mom that she was, always saved the ends of the soap. I don't know if she had a plan for them or not. Maybe she was hoping that someday someone would get the hint and buy her that soap squisher from Lillian Vernon so she could maker herself a nice round "bar" of soap ends.
Being thrifty myself, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Who needed to buy a soap squisher when you could just melt the soap down, put it into some type of mold and make a new bar of soap? Yes, I know that soap doesn't melt - now - but not when I was a wee little thing. So one day when we were left home alone, I convinced my brother to help me melt those little soap ends.
It didn't work. The house smelled like burning soap which smells nothing like Dove or Ivory or any other soap bar for that matter. Despite opening all the windows in the house, it still smelled when my parents got home so the secret was out. And there was no longer any need to buy the soap squisher from Lillian Vernon because my mom no longer saved her soap ends.
Fast forward about 35+ years and I've discovered that there must be a clean gene or a soap gene and even though all of my biological children look decidedly like Kings, they have inherited more than bad eyesight and overcrowded mouths from me; at least one of my children has inherited that fascination with soap. And the flawed thought processes when it comes to creating with the substance.
Last week a friend taught a lesson in hygiene to her children and my youngest family members as well. The lesson culminated in the making of soap, using a kit (no soap squishers here). After they had left, we discovered that one of the bowls that had contained melted soap maker (don't worry - this kind was supposed to be melted), still had some soap residue. One ingenious child, the one who inherited the soap gene from me, took it upon herself to remelt this soap stuff. That would have been fine except she also decided that it needed some coloring. Since our friend had taken the rest of her kit home, including the soap-approved colors, my child decided to use food coloring.
Yes, soap made out of food coloring. The stuff that discolors hands and kitchen counters and everything else it touches.
Thankfully I found the soap before it was used on any bodies. We can all breath a sigh of relief.
I can't wait to see if this child's future children also inherit the clean gene!
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