Sleepless Detergent

So it never bodes well when one cannot fall asleep. Of course, when one is using one's mutant power (reading ridiculous amounts of literature. Currently devouring Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series), this can happen. So, with that being said, I will now work on a post I promised my wife awhile ago.

So, a few weeks ago (Or a month and a half, who's actually counting here?), my wife sent me a "science experiment" to do with Chaos. We do these on occasion, similar to the previous one you saw of the homemade suet (which has been completely eaten, and did not melt. Granted, we got the good suet feeder with the little roof on it and the feeder is on an overhang that keeps most of the weather off. Still, good stuff there), along with trying to sprout avocado seeds, the bird watching (short update: while at a National Park at the New River Gorge, Chaos correctly identified a Red Bellied Woodpecker by sight. Yep, proud moment there), and etc. Basically, if you can get the kid interested, rock it. Now, as I've been all tangential to this point, the science experiment: Make Laundry Detergent. The recipe can be found here.

Now, to be honest, this is not a "take a picture" kind of experiment. You have to move fast so you can get it all split up. As you can see, I did it a little differently than the lady in the article said to do it, but it worked for us. We literally just ran out of this stuff a couple days ago, and will soon be making more.

In the above image, you get the idea of how much laundry detergent I made. I did this with an open mixing bowl, so I had to play with it a bit. I had to figure out how much water I was missing for cold in measuring terms and add that. Then it just fit nicely into 4 quarts (because that's a gallon, duh). It actually fit well into the quart bottles we had. We did add some essential oil to the mixture after it had cooled off (as putting it in hot water can damage the effectiveness of the oil). The specific oil used was OnGuard by doTERRA. I think we added like 2-3 drops per quart.

Now, this was fun, easy, time consuming, and functional. If I could ever get Havoc to wake up at a decent time and then take a morning nap again, this might happen. If not, well, it might be an after they go to bed kind of thing.

All that said, there's more news and notes coming from our trip to Dallas-Ft. Worth, and our recent addiction to Penny Smashing.