I. Am. A. Genius.

I know that I already wrote a blog today, but this is too freaking important.

You may or may not know, I am not the best housekeeper.  Stuff gets done out of necessity - I do laundry because I don't have clothes to wear, I put it away when I can't find anything I need in the toppling pile of folded laundry on the couch; I load the dishwasher because there's no room in the sink, I unload the dishwasher for the same reason, and I hand wash the dishes because I have no knives or skillets. The floors get vacuumed when we have company coming over.  My NEMESIS, however, is the shower curtain.  It is so freaking hard to get more than 6 inches into either side - it slips around, the not-yet-cleaned parts snake back on to the freshly scrubbed parts, once you loosen the grime on the curtain, it gets all over the tub (and vice versa)...it's a nightmare.  And the whole time you're trying to gather up this huge amount of nasty vinyl/plastic and keep it all out of the way.  People complain about the toilet, but seriously?  That takes me like two seconds.

So anyway, we have company (well, Jeff's older brother) coming over and I was planning to clean the bathroom.  Unfortunately I was already in the shower when I remembered, which sucks because it is HARD to scrub off soap scum once everything is all wet.  Luckily we've had a lot of company recently, and everything was pretty clean.  The shower curtain, however, never gets clean.  Oh, I clean it, and maybe I take a few layers of sludge off, but it never looks CLEAN.  I just figure that since it's always guys staying over, it's ok.  As I'm standing there in the shower, I spy some scrubby bath gloves, exactly like these in fact:

FYI, they retail for $5 at the Body Shop, but I got them on clearance for $1.  And since it's the Body Shop, you can probably get them at Target for $0.50.   I used them months ago when my skin was super itchy and my OB told me that a scrubbing oatmeal bath would help; it did, for like two minutes, and it left me with all these messy globs of oatmeal to clean up.  I put one on and started scrubbing furiously away at the little bits of mold that had developed in some of the tile grout, and had a brilliant idea: this would work on the shower curtain!

I get down on my hands and knees (please ignore the fact that I'm naked and over 6 months pregnant) and sure enough, it works AMAZINGLY well.  I just grab the edge of the curtain, scrub with my fingers, and pull down.  Viola, no more scum.  I can even swish the back of my hand along the edge of the tub to get the area behind the curtain clean.  O happy day!  My curtain looks brand new, I have NEVER gotten a shower curtain this clean (in fact, I've been considering trashing this one for a while but was holding out for the move - my M.O. is to just replace them when they get too bad, and this one has been at that point for like 6 months).

It also worked on the aforementioned tile and caulk mold, the rust on my shower head, and the thick soap deposits that build up on our faucet (because our soap dish is right above it).  After I scrubbed everything I sprayed shower cleaner and gave it a quick once-over with the glove, but in the future I will probably put stuff on the glove or spray the shower first.  Now, if you normally use heavy-duty cleaners that require gloves, you're still going to need them because these things won't protect your hands, but you will be amazed at how quickly and efficiently this works.  You can thank me later.

Of course, if you are a Holly Homemaker and clean your shower curtain more than once in a blue moon, you may not even know what kind of buildup I'm talking about.  Don't judge me.  I use a daily shower spray and it just doesn't do anything for that pesky curtain!  Maybe once the baby comes I will have to stay on top of things a little better...we don't need CPS doing home visits...