Sourcing for the most effective and safest home products has been especially important to us with Kai joining the family four years ago.
Since then, Naomi’s been a meticulous household shopper – as far as possible, we eat only organic produce at home. I can’t emphasize this often enough – you get enough trans-fat laden, preservative tainted, pesticide-laced food when you go out. We’ve also eradicated as many toxins as possible from our home – we only use castile soap, vinegar and water to clean most surfaces, zero insecticides.
And when it comes to household necessities, people tend to forget about the toilet quite a bit. Thankfully, there’s someone watching our toilet stock closely in our household. Yes.. It has come down to this, I am talking about toilet paper. Actually, it’s not that surprising. Early in the history of this blog/medium, I spoke with mrbrown on one of the first episodes ever of the mrbrownshow podcast, and we talked about toilet paper, and how one of our ACS schoolmates did not know the Mandarin term for it until on a fateful, diarrhea ridden trip to China in the days when China’s food safety was even more of an issue.
That classmate had to use the lavatory in a Chinese city, and he found it lacking in toilet paper of any kind. So he asked, in his best Mandarin translation of the Hokkien term for it, which was “Pung Sai Zhoa” (literally translates into English as “Shitting Paper”) if he could buy some.
Unbeknownst to him then, our schoolmate had been politely but urgently asking a bewildered Chinese native if he could buy some paper with shit on it.
Seriously though, toilet tissue is an important issue in our household. Thankfully, we’ve been using the Kleenex brand for many years. In our recent trip to the supermarket, we got their new range that’s enriched with Aloe Vera extract.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of good toilet tissue. If you’re like me and get to use a public toilet often, you’d have had your fair share of waxy, single ply, crappy toilet paper. Sometimes, the quality of the wipe is less than optimal, and you end up taking half the roll to clean yourself after you’ve done your business.
And need we tell you that when it comes to toilet paper use, the term “breakthrough” is not a positive one.
We don’t have to teach Kai to be this discerning either. Toilet paper to him is either “just nice” or “too scratchy”. And when we’re using the “too scratchy” one, you can count on him being cranky the whole day after. Thank goodness we’ve always used Kleenex tissues at home, and now that there’s Kleenex Aloe Vera, we might just have to dabao some out when we leave the house.
I’ve also just found out recently that Kleenex is FSC certified – if you care about which companies use responsibly managed forests, you’ll be happy to know Kleenex does.
Details like these are small but significant if you care about running a proper household, and Naomi and I do.
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