Water, it’s kind of a big deal. But what’s really in it, is it safe?

Millions of people around the world suffer from illnesses spread by polluted water.  I’ve seen enough of those heart-wrenching commercials about a small village in a country thousands of miles away with no access to clean drinking water. The stories are awful and my gratitude goes out to those who volunteer to do their part in improving the quality of life for perfect strangers.

You might say, “but that’s on the other side of the world, that wouldn’t happen here.” I’ll bet there was a time when the residents of Flint, Michigan said the same thing.  Ever since I first read about Flint’s water crisis in 2014 I haven’t looked at my water the same.  Over the years I bought a whole house water filter, a filtered instant hot spout on my sink and even a filtered water pitcher which sits on my counter.  Because like dad always said “If you’re going to do something, then take it to the extreme”.

Recently I reached out to my local water company to ask the tough questions

• Is my water safe?
• If I don’t just take your word for it is there a publicly available report I could read?
• Where did I leave my other green dangly earing?

Well, two out of three ain’t bad. Their representative told me our water is incredibly clean and perfectly fine to drink and he provided me with a report that may or may not have been in English. I recognized a lot of the letters and numbers but when you put them all together it was like a word salad, and not the kind you would toss.  Let’s just say my chemistry knowledge to this day still rivals that of Gene from high school, meaning I really didn’t understand most of it.

So next stop …the Environmental Working Group’s Tap Water Database (https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/) where I learned I had 30 total contaminants in my water and 5 exceed their guidelines. But what does that mean? I know it’s not crystal clean water that came from a babbling brook in Maine (why they babble I have no idea) but am I the next Flint, Michigan?  I was pretty sure the water company wasn’t going to tell me “Oh, your water is garbage, you should probably keep your mouth closed when you shower”. I needed to get impartial answers from someone with nothing to gain.  At this point the Wikipedia side of my brain had kicked in and I spent many a sleepless night wondering what sort of physical damage our water could be doing to do my family.  Now don’t get me wrong, emotional damage is just part of good parenting, but physical is where I draw the line.

Well thanks to the good folks at envirotestkits.com I can put my worries to rest.  They sent me an awesome water quality test kit so I could get the answers I so desperately needed.  So check out the video and see how we did. And if you happen to see a green dangly earing in the background anywhere let me know.

Envirotestkits.com provided me with a SafeHome water quality test kit to facilitate this review; however, all opinions expressed are my own. 

Editor’s note (2026): This review reflects the information available when it was originally published. Water quality standards, testing methods, and recommendations continue to evolve, so always check your local water utility’s most recent Consumer Confidence Report and current independent resources if you’re evaluating your own drinking water.

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2020. What a mess!

But like the filthy Genie that I am (without the Barbara Eden outfit), I have 3 pieces of good news for you.

First, as you can see, we’ve been hard at work (well, he’s been hard at work) putting a fresh coat of paint on the Living Clean and Dirty website.  Still living green, still staying filthy, but with a cleaner, simpler look. Drop me a line and let me know what you think, and if you haven’t subscribed yet then you know what to do.

Second, you all remember meeting our new pup Leia at one of our Saturday Night Lives.  Well our Leia has found her Han (literally we named him Han Solo), the picture below is our scruffy-looking Nerfherder (ask a Star Wars fan) playing leap frog with our princess.

The third bit of news I think may even be more exciting.  When I made the pureWash pro video last year I never would have guessed that JUST YESTERDAY i would still be getting comments…in Italian. Thanks google translator for letting me spread the clean and dirty to an international audience.

I thought it would be helpful to answer the most popular question I get (yes, they’re real and they’re spectacular), and the second most popular question…does the pureWash Pro really work?

So here’s the honest truth…10 months later. It TOTALLY still works, I haven’t used a drop of laundry detergent, clothes (and laundry machine) smell great, but about a week ago my clothes started to smell like I peeled them off of a dead body (don’t ask me how I know).  At first I thought maybe my homemade deodorant was failing me until one of my girls pulled a sweatshirt out of the laundry, threw it on and then winced.  “Ugh, did one of the dogs shit in the laundry machine?”  Obviously Han and Leia both took great offense to this and will probably shit in her bed out of spite (and so the cycle of laundry continues). I was hopeful that the advised yearly cartridge change would be our one-way ticket out of stinktown.

Do I have your attention now…of course I do.

You’ll have to watch the video to find out what happened.

The post pureWash Pro X2 10 Months Later…so many loads appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.

In my house whenever I say, “I need to do the laundry” my hubby jumps up and down screaming, “I’m the laundry”.  Unlike most people I know I like doing the laundry, the one where I actually clean our clothes, and even my husband’s version that messes up my sheets.  Ideally I don’t see a reason to do the laundry more than a couple of times a week, but there are times I find myself in the middle of doing it and don’t even remember how I got there.  Sometimes it’s just easier to give in and do it rather than listen to “the laundry isn’t going to do itself”. It’s easy, you throw a load in while you’re doing other stuff, ok the longer I go down this road the weirder the similarities get…

So anyway, I consider myself a pretty eco-friendly gal. I think I do more than most, but I’ve still got a long way to go.  When it comes to “clothes” laundry, I’m always trying to make this domestic ritual more eco-friendly. I never, and I mean never did a laundry that wasn’t a full load using cold water. I’ve tried every eco/green/non-toxic laundry detergent on the market, washed my clothes with soap nuts, attacked stains using only eco-friendly stain removers and line dried almost all my clothes. It should come as no surprise that both my washer and dryer are Energy Star and if I wore a pair of jeans or a top for only an hour or two – I hang them back up to wear again before cleaning them. Stop judging, you know you do that too.

The problem has always been, unless I’m using some sort of actual “detergent”, my laundry is missing two things. My clothes aren’t clean and they don’t smell nice, both of which are factors that seem pretty important in my laundry adventures.  So the hunt has been ongoing for a magical laundry solution and I think I just recently found it.  I’m a research geek and never met a google search that I couldn’t get lost in like Alice down the rabbit hole.  Let me introduce you to my new Bestie, the pureWash pro. Much like the return of Beverly Hills 90210 it sounded too good to be true and I expected crushing disappointment. I finally found a friend who actually had one and she said it was the Holy Grail of eco-laundry.  She swore that everything good I had heard about it was true and so much more. I was still skeptical; but I decided to be brave and hope for the best.  I reached out to the makers of the pureWash Pro, explained who I was and what I was about, and now a few weeks later I’m writing about a product that has literally changed my life.

“Giddy with delight” is the best way to describe how I felt when I found the delivery box on my doorstep from the wonderful people at Greentech Environmental.  At last the wait was over…I had a pureWash Pro X2 in my house, ready to install and review. Let me rephrase that…for my husband to install and me to review.  Hubby knows his way around a pipe wrench but he said that even I would have been able to install it and I’m way more Dora the Explorer than Bob the Builder. He said if you understand how to hang a picture on a wall and attach a garden hose to the nozzle outside your house then you have all the skill required to install this in your laundry room. The fine folks at Greentech Environmental also sent me an awesome magnetic mounting kit, which includes all the hardware and bracketing to mount my purWash unit to the back of our washing machine but because of the way my hubby modeled our laundry room it was better for us to mount it to the wall. I will say that the magnetic mounting bracket was genius and would make it even easier to install, especially if your laundry is in the basement, nobody wants to start drilling holes into concrete walls.

In anticipation of this laundry revolution I took a page out of my family’s book when it comes to laundry…I left it on the floor.  It piled up for over a week, even our dog started to make a little bed for herself in this miniature mountain of dirty clothes. My kids were forced to wear the clothes in the back of the closet. You know what I’m talking about, the other 90% of their clothes that they just never put on. After a quick hubby installation I was elected the mayor of LaundryTown, population me.

“Holy Shit, it works!”

The first thing my whole family noticed about my pureWash pro X2 experiment was the smell. Our clothes came out with a clean almost electric smell, one of my daughters actually said “mmmmmm, smells like lightning”.  Now don’t ask me how or why she would know what lightning would smell like or if lightning even has a smell, but in a strange way I have to agree with her.

I have been using the X2 for about a month and not once have I added laundry detergent to any of my loads. My clothes come out clean and fresh; although to be fair, for the past few years all my detergents were fragrance free.  The other smell I noticed was the smell that was missing. That dank, moldy smell in my washing machine after using it a few times. If you have a front loader you know exactly what I’m talking about. You have to dry the machine after every single use and each month you have to wash your washing machine. It’s friggin’ crazy, you actually have to run an empty load using white vinegar to clean your washing machine. Clean your washing machine, how stupid and wasteful is that? Next you’re going to tell me that shampoo running down your body doesn’t count as showering.

Because I’m a wild woman who lives on the edge, I even started a load of wash before I went to bed and didn’t take it out until the next night. We’ve all done it and usually when you open it up your clothes have that “ugh I forgot we left that dead body in here” smell and you’re forced to wash them yet again.  Well, I don’t know exactly what sort of sorcery they’re using over at Greentech Environmental but the “death smell” was gone, not “better” but completely gone.  Clean clothes in a lightning storm, that’s what I smelled and I’m not ashamed to say I loved it.  I put them in the dryer and went about my day.

So let’s recap

Clothes smell great…check!

Washing machine doesn’t need to be cleaned or wiped down all the time like a toddler running with a full glass of grape juice…check!

Not spending an embarrassing amount of money on strictly organic laundry detergent…priceless!

I can quote you all of the technical specs from their website and from other reviewers, but that’s stuff you can look up yourself and honestly I’m more concerned about the “does it work”  than the “HOW does it work” so here are three important facts I want you to walk away from this review with.

1.  It works
2.  It works
3.  A 2^nd season of BH90210 should happen

Laundry has never been easier, come out cleaner and fresher or been more eco-friendly. The downside is now I have no excuse to not throw a load of laundry in before bed and leave it until morning.  Now that doing the laundry is even easier to do, Hubby has volunteered to help me with the laundry anytime I want.  We may each be talking about different versions of doing the laundry, but now I feel like I’m winning either way.

Greentech Environmental provided me with a pureWash Pro to facilitate this review; however, all opinions expressed are my own. 

The post Saving Money and the Earth…One Load at a Time appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.

I hate the idea of a bucket list, it’s so depressing.  Instead I keep a constant “Life to Do List” running in my head.  High up on that list was a visit to Mystic, Connecticut. If you are like me and have started to get some AARP literature in the mail then you’ll remember the film Mystic Pizza where I was first introduced to Julia Roberts before her stint as the hooker with a heart of gold (I’m referring to the film Pretty Woman, not her actual private life). Mystic is a short road trip, about 3 hours, but I’ve never seemed to get there…until now. My BFF from childhood has 2 daughters and I have 2 daughters and being busy moms we were all in need of a fun (and educational), overnight trip, with no boys allowed!

We arrived at the Mystic Marriott Hotel and Spa and checked into our AMAZING suite (check out the video of our room by clicking HERE).  We wanted to stay at this hotel for all the amenities you’d expect from a Marriott, especially the indoor pool.  This let the mommies relax and catch up while our four not-so-little fishies swam the afternoon away.  The hotel was a quick drive from historic downtown Mystic where we ate dinner and walked around the waterfront town.  Grabbing homemade ice cream ended our night on a sweet note.  

Breakfast inside the hotel at the beautiful Octagon Restaurant was exactly what we needed to start our day of learning, exploring and feeding the marine life.  We visited Mystic Aquarium during Mystic Spirit Week which included all the regular aquarium activities plus many extras including craft tables for the kids and even live music. Our girls loved the interactive 4-D Theater where we got to see, feel, hear and even smell the elements of the movie creating a real life experience.  I especially loved the Sea Lion show and was thrilled to learn about their animal rescue program which was right up my alley.  

Here’s a look at our girl’s trip.Keep it in mind for your next day (or overnight) trip

Click HERE for more information about Mystic Marriott Hotel and Spa.

Click HERE for more information about Mystic Aquarium.

Mystic Marriott Hotel and Spa hosted my family for an overnight stay at their hotel and Mystic Aquarium hosted my family for the day for the purpose of this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

The post Our Mystic-al Girl’s Trip appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.

For us, family camp combined the fun things about an outdoorsy vacation with the amenities of an indoorsy vacation.  My husband called it “camping without the camping” and I called it “high-class summer camp for the whole family”, but we both summarized our entire week long vacation at Family Camp in 5 words. “We can make that happen.”  Let me explain…

My gang has taken a fair amount of family vacations over the past decade but I never felt as pampered and catered to as I did on this trip.  We still refer to it as the “We can make that happen” (WCMTH) vacation.  From the moment we arrived I received strict instructions from the counselors and staff: “This is your time to relax, not have to cook and not have to worry about your kids…we got this”.  And you’d better believe I followed those instructions to a “T”.  The service at Family Camp was OUTSTANDING.  Anything we wanted we got (WCMTH).

• You loved the couscous at dinner last night and want it on the menu every night…(WCMTH)
• My daughter wants to learn how to skateboard…(WCMTH)
• I’m interested in improving my golf swing…(WCMTH)
• I always hear about Vermont and their cheese, how about a cheese tasting night…(WCMTH)
• I’m not sure if there’s time but I’d really like to take a personalized yoga class…(WCMTH)
• My kids didn’t like the dinner choices, any chance of getting some pizzas…(WCMTH)
• Another camper had a birthday during vacation, can we get her a cake and all sing…(WCMTH)

My husband joked that we should ask for a dinosaur dance group with laser beams on their heads just to see what would happen.  I could go on and on about the wishes granted by the genies of Family Camp and it’s for that reason we already have plans to go back next summer.

Now make no mistake, just because it’s called camp doesn’t mean that we roughed it by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m not the type to sleep in a tent so I was thrilled with the two bedroom, two bathroom condominium with fully-equipped kitchen, laundry and living room…all the comforts of home.  We were a short walk from “home base” which is the Sundance Base Lodge near the Grand Summit Resort Hotel.  We had access to all the amenities of the property including an indoor pool, outdoor pool, hot tub, basketball court, health club, steam room, sauna, arcade and fitness classes.

We paid extra for trips to the hotel spa and alcohol, but aside from that everything from drink refills to day long excursions were included.

So here’s a fact that’s funny but true.  I’m not outdoorsy and my husband doesn’t like meeting new people.  If I gave you the criteria of our dream family vacation, this trip would not have been on the top of the list.  We took a chance on something new and I can honestly say this vacation has been one of the greatest experiences we ever had as a family.  We absolutely loved it and CANNOT recommend it enough to everyone we know.  We met 4 other families and spent the week talking, laughing and watching our kids play together.  My husband got along great with the other dads and I had a great time biking in the fresh air amid the beautiful Mount Snow scenery. At the end of the trip, all five families agreed on two things:

1. The service at Family Camp was beyond what any of us ever experienced.  Two of the families (they were sisters) travel every summer together and they went to a different family-style camp the previous year.  They both agreed that this camp was monumentally better.  Like me, they raved about the personal touches and now would accept nothing less than the experience they had at Mount Snow Family Camp.
2. All 5 of our families linked up on Facebook and exchanged information.  We all are coming back next summer TOGETHER.

My husband’s favorite activity was the downhill mountain biking.  My 10-year old, Emma, loved sailing through the trees and ziplines at Ramblewild aerial park.  My 8-year old, Chloe, couldn’t decide what she liked more, tubing and swimming in the lake or kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding.  As for mom, while I’m not too outdoorsy I loved hiking down one of the Mt. Snow trails with my hubby and another couple.  The weather was perfect, the scenery was beautiful and the pace was my own.

Before this trip I knew next to nothing about Family Camp at Mount Snow but I figured we would take a chance and try a new experience.  This turned out to be an unforgettable adventure that we still talk about today and are excited about returning to next summer.  I can’t remember a vacation ever having that effect on me before so thanks everyone at Family Camp for “Making That Happen”.

Click HERE for more information.

Mount Snow hosted my family for a five-night stay at Family Camp for the purpose of this review. All opinions expressed are my own.

The post Summer Camp…it’s not just for kids anymore appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.

My husband is very picky about where we go on vacation as a family.  He says his criteria are simple.  We must go somewhere that has something for everyone, must be all under one roof because constant traveling is not a vacation, and most importantly the kids can entertain themselves so we’re not always “on” and have to keep them occupied.  Now you know why we stay home a lot.  It’s tough to find vacation spots like this but I’m happy to report that we found it and it’s just a short road trip away!

We were invited to the Grand Opening of Kalahari Resorts & Conventions in the Pocono Mountains and this trip even put a smile on my picky husband’s handsome face. Kalahari is Pennsylvania’s largest indoor water park measuring in at 100,000 square feet (that’s almost 2 acres) and it kept my kids busy for a full two days.  Kalahari is an authentically African-themed experience with all the amenities of an upscale resort.  It’s also privately owned by the Nelson family who created it with the idea of “protecting an endangered species—family time”.

For almost 6 hours on our first day, my kids were going down water slides, body surfing, relaxing on the lazy river and making new friends, while my husband and I got to spend a few precious hours at the swim up bar talking to friends and just hanging out…together.  I cannot remember the last time we had such a fun day like we did in Kalahari.  When we weren’t on our “date”, we went down water slides as a family.  I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat so I put on a smile and went down the HUGE water slide because my 8 year old daughter batted her eyelashes at me and begged me to go down with the rest of our clan. How could I say no?  The first time I screamed it was out of fear, after that all the screams were from fun.  I have never been on water slides like this, not even when I was a kid. Sitting in the raft with my daughters and my husband, I was overwhelmed with the feeling of gratitude for the opportunity to reconnect as a family. Not a single electronic device or TV was turned on once while at Kalahari.

Our days were full of water park fun, but the nights were reserved for the 30,000 square foot Family Entertainment Center.  My girls spent hours in the arcade, went mini-bowling and even played a round of black light mini-golf.

After breakfast on the second day of our trip my 8 year old was vibrating in her seat waiting to get to the water park.  “Chloe” my husband told her, “relax, it’s open for another 11 hours.”  To which she replied, “I know Dad, I want to make the most of it and not run out of time.”

This trip was such a huge hit with my family that Emma has already planned her 11th birthday later this year at Kalahari.  Before we even checked out of our room she declared, “I love Kalahari, it’s my favorite resort. If we come back for my birthday I don’t need any other presents.”  As you can imagine, that’s high praise indeed for any family destination.

So what are you waiting for?  If you love an all-under-one-roof vacation experience with something for everyone then update that summer bucket list and book an adventure at Kalahari by clicking HERE.  It gets the thumbs up from this mom, an 8-year old, a 10-year old and a picky husband.

The post Kalahari Resorts & Conventions in the Poconos appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.

Hi guys, I know you are all struggling along without your regular LC&D updates so I thought I’d throw you a quick one to hold you over.  Another tip from my kitchen and this is one of my favorites.  Add 1 part great vegetable, a cup of water, a dash of free and voila…magic scallions.  Doug Henning (look it up) would say “it’s an illusion”, well sorry Doug this tip is all real. I’ll never have to buy scallions again and after this neither will you. (I mean you the reader, not Doug Henning…he’s dead so that would be weird).

Catch you next time…

The post So smart, It’ll make you cry appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.

and then if you’re still hungry for more click HERE to check out the chip slicer and tray (warning: there are no musical instruments at this link)

The post Who gives a chip? appeared first on Living Clean and Dirty.