Home Made Fragrant Foaming Hand Soap

One of our favorite money saving strategies combined with our desire to use products that are as natural as possible is making our own foaming hand soap. My recipe for this has evolved over time as I’ve played around with it. I’ve now come up with what I think is a pretty awesome strategy that is very adaptable.

 Little guy walked by and insisted on being in the photo. So I had him do the "Vanna White" thing.

First, you simply need to have a foaming soap pump. I’ve collected several of these over the years and always aim for getting the nicest looking ones (since what’s inside doesn’t matter much when I’m going to be making my own).  I’ve found some great ones in colors and styles that I like and that go with our rooms and décor as well as some cute ones for kids. I avoid the “cheap-y” looking ones with the wrap around plastic label and aim for those with a color and a label I can remove. If you want a basic clear one, the Method brand is nice looking and a good shape.

I use a non-scented, pure castile soap from Dr. Bronner’s. This is the “baby mild” version as it has no scent. We buy a gallon of this stuff at a time for the best price and this is the same soap we’ve used as baby bath for the little guy over the years. I’ve also found an unscented version from Seattle Organics which I discovered at my local Grocery outlet for about 1/3 the regular price. Either of these work well.

The soap is easily and naturally scented by using essential oils. Although your initial investment in a few of these oils may seem like a lot, you’ll use them for a very long time and for various uses. When we started doing this, we already had a good sized collection of essential oils so we never had to actually buy any for this purpose. I’ve used lavender, grapefruit and peppermint the most. One of my favorite scents, which I generally have in the guest bathroom is Vanilla Mint, accomplished by using a few drops of peppermint and a few drops of vanilla extract. It smells wonderful!

You’ll need to play around a bit with the quantities as it will depend on the size of your soap container and strength of the liquid soap, but generally speaking you want to squirt about an inch or so of soap in the bottom of the container, then add a few drops or more of the essential oil and fill the rest with water. It’s as easy as that! You’ll know if you’ve not used enough soap because it will simply not feel very “soapy” and instead will feel too thin to clean, even though it's foamy. You’ll know if you used too much soap if it is difficult to pump out of the dispenser. 

As I was setting up the items to photograph the hubby came by and asked what I was doing. I said I was writing a blog post about how we make our own hand soap. His response; “We make our own hand soap?”

Let me know if you try this and how you like it. Happy soap making!

My Unique “Dear Photograph”

Little Guy has one of those motorized vehicles, a yellow Jeep, that he received several months ago and loves driving it around the back yard. Ironically, the Teenager, back when he was Little Guy’s age actually had the same Jeep in red. It occurred to me that I had a photo of Teenager driving his Jeep in the backyard circa 1998. I thought it would be a fun to take a photo of LG in his Jeep in a similar position as the old photo of a then young Teenager in his in the very same backyard. Not to mention the irony in the fact that back when Teenager rode around in his red Jeep he gave his Winnie the Pooh a ride; the very same Pooh that I kept and passed on to LG.

As I was forming this idea in my mind, I heard about the new website Dear Photograph where you take a picture of the present at the same time as holding a picture from the past. I thought my idea would be a unique take on this and pretty special considering my situation of having two sons, nearly fourteen years apart with one now in college and the other in Kindergarten. It makes it even more nostalgic when you add in the very same backyard and the same stuffed bear and the kid from the past in the present photo all grown up. Surprisingly, the folks at Dear Photograph have not yet posted my photo. I don’t know if they just haven’t gotten to it yet but they are clearly missing out on a great photo to post to their site. I don’t want my readers to miss it, so I’m going to share it here with all of you.

 

 

A little bit of trouble

So far, little guy has been doing quite well in school. He enjoys it, has never complained about going or had an issue with being left there. He’s learning, coming home singing cute songs and so far has avoided most trouble. We’ve only had a couple small incidences. The most recent incident involved his teacher pulling me aside and trying not to smirk too much as she proceeded to tell me that he’d gotten himself into a bit of trouble... for kissing girls. Oh dear. We’ve tried to explain to our very affectionate little boy that we just cannot do that in school and that while it’s okay to hug and/or kiss our family and perhaps close friends outside of school, at school it’s not okay. He was slow to comprehend this concept and we had to more emphatically state that’s it’s a rule, a school rule; “No kissing”. He looked at me quizzically and said; Okay Mommy, but…. where’s the ‘no’ sign?  It took me a moment to understand that he was talking about one of these;

Apparently he felt that if school was going to have a no kissing policy there should be clearly posted ‘no’ signs indicating this. Despite the fact that I had to impress upon my child that he could not do this and it wasn’t okay, as a parent the humor was certainly not lost on me. I have to admit he’s got an adorably amusing point.