Clean carpets

After several months of intending to get our carpets cleaned, I finally made it happen earlier this week. When we moved into the house last February the off-white carpets looked fairly decent but two of the bathrooms are carpeted (what is up with that? Almost every house we looked at when we were in the market to purchase had carpeted bathrooms.) and I found that incredibly repulsive. Bathroom floors should be constructed out of something that can be doused in powerful chemicals to remove any traces of human DNA in any form like a nice tile or perhaps even a laminate, but carpet? I don't even want to know what lurks in the fibrous material that blankets the floor of our upstairs bathrooms. I get the willies just thinking about it. Bleh.

While the carpeted bathrooms had me keeping my gag reflex in check since we bought the place, I didn't think about the rest of the house until the Infant became mobile. The knees and sleeves of his clothes would end up covered with an ugly brown film after a day of taking laps around the house. As if this weren't enough to motivate me to get a carpet cleaner on the horn, the final straw came when I examined the Infant's feet while he was jumping in his Johnny Jump-up. The kid had "fair feet". Let me explain:

When I was but a young lass, my siblings and I would show our animals at the Rockingham County Fair every year in late August. (If you are unfamiliar with what "showing" animals means, it means you and a bunch of other people with the same breed of animal stand in a ring while an expert in that particular breed judges your animal and decides who's animal has the best characteristics of the breed. It's like a beauty pageant for cows, pigs and sheep and it is awesome.) We usually showed sheep and Jersey cows which meant we had a spot or two in the dairy barns for our cows to eat, sleep and chew their cud for the week of the fair. There were many other families that also housed their dairy cows in the dairy barn including the May sisters. The girls were older than us and had about a dozen dairy cows they brought with them to the fair. Unlike me, they were true farm girls. They slept with their cows, didn't mind being dirty and walked around barefooted. Even as a youngster, I was completely repulsed that these girls would traipse about the manure covered floors and washing stations without so much as a flip-flop on their feet. As you can imagine, their feet seemed to be permanently stained black and I can only imagine that one swab from those tootsies transferred to a petri dish would yield all kinds of colorful bacteria. From that point on, we referred to dirty feet as "fair feet". And this is what my child's feet looked like. I could no longer stand idly by while the Infant's feet became a hot, dirty mess in my own home.

So, I did some research, asked around and settled on a local carpet cleaner that promised to restore my carpets to an almost-new finish. On Monday, the carpet cleaning gentleman showed up with a bevy of tools and chemicals to blast the stains out of carpet. As you may know, I'm a big fan of chemicals. I even have a shirt that reads: I ♥ Chemicals. It's a bold statement but one I believe in. I was hoping that my home would be filled with a nice clean chemical smell but I was disappointed when it ended up smelling like the soap one may use at a do-it-yourself car wash. You know what I'm talking about, the pink stuff that looks good enough to eat but smells kind of like a public restroom. Luckily, the smell dissipated within a day.

When the carpet guy was finished, I took a look around and was thoroughly impressed with the results. Nary a stain was visible and I wanted to hug the guy but thought that might be awkward since we'd just met a few hours before. I sat down on the floor with the Infant telling him how great crawling around would be from this point forward because he wouldn't have fair feet anymore and his clothes wouldn't be covered in filth. Apparently unimpressed by the cleanliness of our home or maybe because he felt more comfortable in the filth, the Infant proceeded to spit up on my newly cleaned carpets. Sigh.