You may have gathered by now that my daughter Georgia is a pretty persnickety petunia. Today while snubbing a quesadilla she remarked, “Yuck! It tastes like it has moldy bits.” She also has a highly sensitive nose and often gasps dramatically, yells “Pew-ta-VEE!” (Her word for P.U.), followed by a command to take out the garbage or the compost [0]. I’ve always been neurotic that my house smells, and this sure doesn’t help.

In the kitchen: “Pew-ta-VEE! Cats, eat that stinky cat food!”

Taking a walk: “Pew-ta-VEE! Someone is smoking!”

In the bathroom: “Pew-ta-VEE! It’s too stinky!”

She can’t use the toilet after anyone has been in there for any reason. So sometimes she opts for our seldom-used second bathroom. When she recently stumbled out of there with fingers pinching her nose in disgust, I thought she was just being dramatic. But it really did stink badly, and I guess it’s because the water just sits most of the time, leaving, even just a few days after cleaning, a strange growth in the toilet bowl and a moldering odor. Pew-ta-vee indeed.

I’ve been trying to avoid using the one toxic cleaner [1] I own, a pine cleaner disinfectant. I hate to put it down the toilet and into the sewage system that ends up in the waterways, endangering wildlife and ecosystems from here to the Pacific Ocean. So I’ve been experimenting a little with castile soap, baking soda, vinegar... you know, the standbys [1]. But it doesn’t keep the green meanies from growing in the rarely used toilet. So I had this thought: why not get one of those drop-in toilet cleaners?

Well, you probably know why not, but it took me a trip to the supermarket, peering under my glasses at the tiny print of the little blue, green, and white packages that promise a clean toilet with every flush to remind me. They have warnings about severe eye, skin, and respiratory dangers that made me want to wash my hands just holding the package! There was plenty of bleach and chlorine, but certainly nothing one could consider green. At my greener grocery store there were plenty of eco-toilet cleaners, but no in-between cleanings option. I wavered; I don’t want to clean that dang toilet every day! Then my research led me to the dreaded flapper failure [2], common in less-used toilets with drop in cleaners. The cleaner dissolves in the tank and gets more and more concentrated, and starts eating away at the flapper like a piranha in a goldfish bowl. That settled it, if it could harm Georgia, the cats, AND make my flapper unflushable it wasn’t coming in my house.

So, what to do? I taught Georgia how to clean the toilet! She embraces it as a very important and grown-up job, and she can take charge of giving it a scrub if it doesn’t meet her standards for cleanliness. She uses a squirt of essential oil-and-water air freshener and scrubs the bilge. It doesn’t get it super clean, but clean and stink-free enough for her to use it. I know this can’t last, but every avoided Pew-ta-VEE feels like a tiny victory.