Handy Hints
#7
Date 8-21-58
Up to now I've not been very handy-with helpful hints. And this column should have some use.
Magazines are full of little ways to make keeping a house an easy job, and offer two dollars if they print your methods. I've sent in a few, but Have' a feeling they end in the Dead Letter Office. At least, nobody ever sent me any two dollars.
Could be that my hits are farfetched. I do everything with five cherubs in mind and may be a bit awkward for the slicks. But I have one set labeled New Ways with Old Brushes. Or use new ones.
For instance. Whenever you pick up that toy broom, sweep down the cobwebs from the ceiling, It just reaches fine, is light to handle.
If you can rescue the discarded toothbrush before junior tries it on the neighbor's dog, set it aside for cleaning the edges, crevices, corners, etc., of your stove chrome trim, knobs, handles and switches. It's really dandy , gets where the fingernail breaks.
And there's the new use for that baby bottle brush. It's great for cleaning rotary beaters. I read one hint on how to clean an eggbeater just beat up your soap suds with it. This must've been for dusty eggbeaters found beneath the sofa. The sticky eggs we have around here laughed in my face!
Now, if somebody would just invent some brush for cleaning ears, I'd have it made.
Speaking of magazines, I spend what spare time I have flipping through the home-and-yard type. I drool over all the lovely furniture, dream long dreams and send for all the free booklets. Seems the only furniture we ever buy runs along the same line , high chairs, cribs, playpens, and beds, beds, beds. Every time a new baby moves from the bassinet to a crib, someone is left on the floor. So we buy a new bed.
It's the same in the kitchen. When the youngest graduates from lap meals to the high chair, and the others each move over a notch, someone is left standing at the table. So we acquire a new chair of some sort.
The home magazines seem to make a big point of decorating for children, of homes meant for the pitter patter of little feet. Trouble is, I doubt that some
editors have ever seen a child, or children en masse. Heaven knows they don't pitter. patter. Those little feet dashing through the house sound more like a herd of wild animals trying to outrace a jungle storm.
Take those pictures you see in the magazines. Mother is in the kitchen frosting a cake. She wears a pink frothy apron that just matches the frosting. Father is enthroned in an easy chair in the nearby family room, reading his paper. He has his shoes on. A fire roars in the fireplace. A little boy, dressed for Sunday church, , is playing with a truck, obviously just unwrapped and still barely touched. A little girl, in party-best, is fondling a doll, with clothes. There is a third child, a baby, sitting on a fluffy rug. He is. chewing, of all things, a rattle. A truly genuine baby rattle.
Let us transfer this scene to Home, as it really is.
Or let me be honest. Let's transfer it to Our Home. I am frosting the cake. My apron is draped on the doorknob. It doesn't even match the door. Father is sprawled over the kitchen table, reading the paper. His shoes are not on.
A fire roars in the living room fireplace. Our family room is separate from the kitchen, down on the lower level. Nobody is in it.
Mary, Tim and John have abandoned their living room activities to argue about who gets the frosting bowl, one on each side of me, one in back. (This is later settled by giving each a spoon and setting the bowl on a chair.
In the living room, Tim has left three vari-sized trucks scattered about one has no wheels, one has no top, the other has been bashed in by some mighty force. They all hark back to the Stone Age. By all appearances John has left an old egg carton, in which he was putting small pieces of paper torn neatly from the latest decorator magazine. Mary. has left an unbathed doll, undressed. The doll's clothes are in an old coffee can, put for safety's sake under Fathers’ chair in the kitchen.
Buzzy hasn't caught on about the frosting. He is busily moving the cut firewood from the hearth to the middle of the chesterfield. Gerry is rolling merrily over the floor chewing on a small plastic chair from Mary's dollhouse.
And that's home. And who'd want to change it?
Who could? |
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