Mopping!

The dry season in Bangladesh is well underway and will continue, from what we have heard, for the next couple of months, until finally the rains are unleashed in June or so and it will be rainy and muddy everyday again. When we arrived it was towards the end of the rainy season and when Sam came for both trips in the two prior years it was during the rainy season as well, so we had gotten used to the rain and mud as part of life here. Then beginning in about October the rains slowly dissipated. It was odd after having experienced rain on a near daily basis (it had also, by chance, rained nearly every day in both Boston and Colorado the spring and summer before we came here) to realize that it hadn’t rained for several weeks. During the wet season we were, of course , looking forward to the dry season, but we soon realized that the dry season brought its own difficulties. The biggest of all probably being the dust.

As you can probably imagine when there are several months without a drop of rain things get incredibly dusty. We immediately noticed that the air quality got much worse without the daily rains to knock the particles out of the sky. You could see the gunk in the air, and feel it coating your lungs. In fact, most people seem to have chronic respiratory problems during the dry months (including us). We also noticed that everyday our apartment seemed to be coated in a fine layer of dust. This is a constant battle to keep at bay. Although most people have nannies/maids here to do the daily chores we have opted not to hire one (partially because we have noticed that many of the expat children here with maids are often incredibly ill-behaved and have no habit of cleaning up after themselves and partially because well, our parent taught us how to clean up after ourselves…).

So, this constant dust means that we have to be vigilant with dusting, sweeping and mopping, which is kind of a pain because our apartment is probably the largest place we have lived in our adult lives. To add to that, the entire place is tiled and in many of the rooms the tiles are white. To add to that, you have to turn off the fans when you are sweeping , which when it is 90+ degrees is pretty unpleasant. The entire process of sweeping and mopping the entire apartment then, can take easily two hours (especially when Jon does it because, as anyone who has worked with him knows, he is incredibly…we’ll say, thorough) and it is less than fun. Because of this Jon has been trying to devise a way to both speed up the process and do a better job (usually by the time we are done mopping it is covered in dirty little footprints – curses!).

So while we were out at the store the other day Jon noticed a Wonder Mop mixed in with the other floor cleaning items. He thought ‘hmm, wonder mop, that may just be the answer to our problems.’ Actually, he was thinking that he needed to replace at least one of the floor squeegees for the bathroom that had broken. We decided to buy it and try it out. Following our trip to the store, we stopped by the school to pick up Atticus and as soon as he saw the Wondermop he was extremely excited and held it in his lap and talked about it the whole ride home(maybe he had a premonition about its wonder-ness).

So does the Wonder Mop live up to its name? O.M.G. Yes!
As soon as we brought it home it brought immediate joy to the family (well, mostly Jon and Atticus, but Sam was happy to see Jon so excited to mop…). You could say it mopped away our sorrow. Jon unwrapped it like a kid on Christmas morning and was quickly out on the back patio at the mop sink and then trying it out by mopping the bathroom. While he was in there Atticus went in to see what all the excitement was about and soon joined in the mopping fun. Ahh, nothing like mopping to bring a father and son together. After the mopping was finished Jon set the mop out on the back patio in the mop sink thing that is there. Later that evening Jon was squeezing in some TV while we had power. He soon realized that he hadn’t heard Atticus for a while( which is always suspicious), but he did hear water hitting tin. He went out to the back patio and found Atticus playing with the mop. He had filled up a bucket, was soaking up water and then pulling the lever that squeezes out the mop head and wringing out the mop over the edge of the balcony on to the tin roof below. Here is a pic of him wringing it out.


We decided that since he wanted to play with the mop we should just go ahead and mop the whole apartment. We asked Atticus if he wanted to just mop and he excitedly said ‘yes!’ (is this normal? Probably not.). Of course, Jon was also just as excited, but hid it a little better. So Jon and Atticus set off to mop the place. Atticus did the wet mop and Jon followed behind him with the wonder mop and dry mopped. It was the best mopping experience ever! It went so quick with two people doing it. And Atticus was excited the whole time (well he got a little bored with it towards the end, but still finished). And Jon was amazed at how clean it got the floors and how quickly the floors dried (so was Sam after Jon came and got her to show her). Never has mopping been such a great experience. Thanks wonder mop!*


*This has been a paid advertisement for Wonder Mop. Well, not really, but if they want to email us and talk about endorsement, the door is open…