How To Get Your Patio *Really* Clean

I was inspired by Helen’s blog entry on bubbles and decided to task my elder 2 girls with making bubbles using half of Helen’s recipe in a big roasting tin whilst their sister napped.

Well, they loved the colour, declaring it exactly the colour of bogeys (nice...), and it did indeed make fantastically long-lasting bubbles. But we had a problem – no suitably large bubble wands. I tried attacking a wire coat-hanger with a pair of pliers, but the coat-hanger won (it was too thick). Refusing to be beaten, I rummaged around the kitchen drawers and tried anything with a hole: slotted serving spoons, fish slices (the best!), whisks, biscuit cutters, vacuum-cleaner rubber rings, you name it.

In a complete frenzy of excitement, the minxes screamed, shrieked, jumped, pranced and generally frothed at the mouth, burning off all that pent-up energy as they sent millions of rainbow bubbles into a cold, grey sky. A normal reaction to playing with bubbles, really! Then they started to splash the bubble mix on the patio and jump in it, scuffing it around with their feet.

This gave me a brainwave: I badly needed to clean the patio (the seagull colony that nests over the wall in the graveyard leaves a terrible mess in early summer) so just got my 2 happy, busy minxes, added 2 brooms, and stepped well back out of the splash zone...

20 minutes later, the patio, ground floor windows and both daughters were entirely covered in a thick layer of mud-coloured soapy bubbles. I hosed everything and everyone down, revealing a very clean patio and sparkling, smear-free windows. The girls went straight into a hot bath, exhausted, delirious, and declaring today their “Best day of the Summer Holidays EVER”.

Thank you so much for the inspiration, Helen! Next time we play with bubbles, though, I’m going to try making a bubble-wand with *pipe-cleaners*!