Tis’ the season for a new vacuum!

Posted by on December 4, 2009

Thank you to Mandy from JackandMandy.com for the button!

About a month ago, after another unsuccessful attempt to suck up all the dog hair and filth from my floors, I tweeted something like, “Vacuum, oh vacuum. Why don’t you suck?” because that’s what I do with random vents and frustrations about mindless things like household appliances when there’s no one to voice them to but the toddler, I tweet them. Later that day I got an email from Dyson’s PR folks. They wanted to send me a vacuum, promising I’d never complain about lack of suction again.

I mulled around my wishy washy stance on product reviews as of late and how I’d been thinking of giving them up altogether because I was sick of worrying about becoming “that mommy blogger”, then I tossed it aside with the quick reminder to myself that, “HELLO!! This is a DYSON!” and I promptly agreed to accept the offer.

The next week I came home to my husband, sitting in a pile of cardboard and Dyson D25 vacuum pieces, assembling it with a look of Christmas morning plastered on his face. “It came!” he exclaimed (and suddenly this blog of mine just got really serious for him). He put it together with lightening speed and proceeded to start vacuuming. I had to stop him, “Hey, wait! I’m the one who’s supposed to be reviewing it. Hang on!” “But I’m just going to do one room,” he replied. We were arguing over who got to vacuum. Cue Twilight Zone music.

After I managed to wrestle it away from him I got our old Hoover out to do a little experiment. I ran it over the living room floor and it pulled up a ton of stuff. We’d been gone over the weekend and hadn’t had a chance to vacuum, so there was a lot for it to suck up. Looking at the amount of hair and debris in the canister, it looked like the Hoover did a pretty decent job. Plus, it left such pretty track marks that always make me feel like my house is a whole extra level of clean.

Then I brought in the Dyson and ran it over the same area. O….M…..G…. gross. It pulled up just as much as the Hoover did on the first pass, and it somehow even managed to suck up a small feather. I don’t know where the feather came from, still haven’t been able to figure that one out.

I handed it back over to my husband since he was itching to put it to the test. He ran it in every room of the house, and it’s like our carpet changed colors, which was both exciting and made me want to gag. When he got to the hallway, I stopped him and asked what the attachment on the handle did. He pulled it up and showed me that it was the Quick-Draw Telescope Reach wand. I looked above us and noticed the vents that needed cleaning, like, 6 months ago. We put it to the test. That bad boy sucked every last speck of dust off that vent, and it was a beautiful thing.

Since then, we’ve used it several times, both on the carpet and on our kitchen and bathroom tile floors. You can turn the brush bar off and on, so I think it’s safe to use on hardwoods, but we didn’t test it on that surface since we don’t have any. It does a great job of quick cleanup on the kitchen floor, though, which makes it even more useful for me.

So here’s the official pros and cons list, let’s start with the cons because, yes, there are a few.

Cons:

1. Price- Yeah, that’s a big one. We’ve always wanted a Dyson, but that’s a hefty chunk of change that we haven’t been able to justify spending, especially since the Hoover wasn’t exactly dead yet. At full retail price, this model costs more than my washing machine does ($499.99). That being said, I saw them on sale during Black Friday, and I’ll bet they go on sale again. Also, I will say that if you have the $$ to spend and are in the market for a new vacuum, I would consider it a wise investment.

2. Noise- In comparison to our old vacuum, this seems to be louder. Not that that’s a huge issue for me, but just an observation.

3. Cord- The cord is shorter than my old vacuum, meaning I have to move the plug to three outlets to reach the whole house instead of two.

4. No cool looking tracks- Weird, I know. I think I’m just so trained to feel the house is “clean” when I see those vacuum tracks in the carpet. Oh well, I’ll get over it.

Soo… that’s pretty much it for the cons. On to the pros.

Pros:

1. It works!- Holy cow, it really works, tracks or not, this thing sucks everything up. Even better, the lazy homemaker in me loves that it seems that I can go even longer in between vacuuming. See, I’m not one of those vacuum every day type of people. I vacuum when it reaches a certain level of gross. It seems I can go longer before reaching that level.

2. It moves!- It’s really very easy to maneuver. So easy that I was able to vacuum all the way around my tantruming toddler as he laid on the floor, kicking and screaming.

3. It’s lightweight- It’s easy for me to lift up and over baby gates.

4. Cleanup- It’s easy to empty the container, and the debris doesn’t seem to start oozing out before you open it up. That happened with our old vacuum.

5. Filters- No need to replace a filter, just wash the filter that’s in there every three months. Comes with very clear instruction on how to do this.

6. The Quick-Draw Telescope Reach wand- It’s really so much easier to just pop this thing up and use it than what I had to do with my old vacuum, which meant disconnecting a dirty hose.

7. All floors!- I love, love, love that it cleans up my kitchen tile floor better than I ever could with a broom and a dustpan.

8. Style- Hey, it’s a good looking piece of machinery.

So this is the part that I’m most excited to write about. They not only were kind enough to send me a new vacuum, but they agreed to giveaway a brand new D25 to one of my readers, too! So exciting! So I’m going to run this more like a traditional giveaway to give everyone a few chances to enter. Here’s what you need to do (do any or all of these things, your choice, just leave one comment for each thing you do):

1. Comment below telling me why you want a Dyson D25
2. Subscribe to my feed
3. Follow me on Twitter (@BabyRabies)
4. Tweet about this contest
5. Blog about this contest and link back to this page
6. Make a donation to your local food bank

(To answer some questions, if you’re already following me on Twitter or already subscribe to my feed, that’s cool! Still eligible to enter, just leave me a comment saying so. Also, any donation to any organization giving food to the hungry this season counts.)

That’s it! I’ll use Random.org to draw a winner on Friday, December 18th sometime early-ish in the day, just in time for the holidays!

(Only open to residents of the US and Canada due to shipping.)

And in case it’s not already clear, I received the Dyson D25 for free to review.

Comments are now closed. The winner was drawn on December 18th.

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A letter to my vaccum

Posted by on November 7, 2008 2 Comments

Dear Vacuum,

First, allow me to apologize for ignoring you this last year.  A vacuum with no work to do must be a sad vacuum, and I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you.  The truth is that there was plenty of work to be done, but I was too pregnant, tired, lazy, exhausted or otherwise indisposed to use you as often as I probably should have.  Yes, we had our occasional fling, but from this moment on I am promoting you back from part time household appliance to full time appliance!

It seems, Vacuum, that this baby of mine has decided to start to move about.  He is no longer the baby that would stay where I put him.  I am afraid he proved this to me today when he log rolled from the center of his blanket all the way over to the entertainment center before I could fill a glass of water in the kitchen.  In fact, I will be sending a letter to the entertainment center following this, detailing our baby-proofing plan of action, which will have to take effect immediately.

And, nothing magnifies just how much I have been neglecting you, vacuum, as my baby rolling around on the floor, especially when this new mobile phase is accompanied by the oral exploratory phase where he must put everything in his mouth or put his mouth on everything.  I actually caught him, face down, sucking on the carpet just the other day.

As you know, we have a tough job ahead of us.  The two large dogs and cat will challenge us everyday, but together we can achieve a semblance of cleanliness.  I am sure that we will be great partners, and we can be proud of ourselves every night knowing that we prevented that dust bunny, and those flecks of lint and dirt, and, most importantly, the tumbleweeds of dog hair from ending up in my baby’s digestive tract.

So, what do you say?  Are you with me?  I am excited and enthused and promise to keep this level of passion for a clean floor until I come back to reality and realize that I most likely will find other things to do with the 15 minutes a day it takes to vacuum, like chase after a toddler.  But until then, you and me buddy…. yes we can!

Sincerely,
Overly optimistic, bordering unrealistic mom who just needs to deal with the fact that her kid is going to eat some dog hair

Kendall is 6 months and 4 days old (and so damn near close to crawling)

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Sleep Through the Static

Posted by on July 29, 2008 7 Comments

An appropriate title for the newest addition to my CD collection (Jack Johnson’s latest).  I picked it up a couple months ago when my sister and I made the road trip to house hunt.  But, instead of spending the drive jamming out to our new tunes, we spent most of the trip listening to static on the radio as loud as we could stand it.  Why?  Because it made Kendall shut up and fall asleep.  Ever since then, I’ve spent countless hours listening to static, vacuums and hair dryers in an effort to drown out and eventually stop the relentless screaming.  People say, “how can you STAND to listen to that noise?”.   I tell them, “because it drives me a little less crazy than listening to my kid’s non-stop wailing…. just a little…. and I’ll take that little bit of sanity right now.”

We discovered Kendall’s love for the monotonous hum of a hair dryer on the house hunting trip when he was a little over 4 weeks old.  My sister was soothing Kendall one morning as I was blow drying my hair.  As soon as I turned the dryer off, he began his level 10 scream, so Kelly quickly yelled at me to turn it back on.  I did…. and it worked!  He stopped!  The next day, after a too early in the morning to get up feeding, we tried it again, and it lulled him back to sleep.  We left the dryer hanging from the bathroom wall and all dozed off.  My sister jumped out of bed 30 minutes later terrified that we were about to blow the place up.  Luckily Kendall had finally drifted deep enough to not notice and we all managed to get a bit more sleep that morning.

Since that joyous discovery, we have used the hair dryer and the vacuum more than once (those dust buster types are great…. so portable!), but the problem is you can’t leave them on for too long, and many times when I think Kendall is down for good and it’s safe to turn them off (and I’m starting to wonder if I smell smoke) he wakes with a fiery pissed-off-ness the moment I shut it off.  So we tried static on the radio.  It worked okay.  It was our only option while in the car.  But that radio just ain’t like it used to be.  We couldn’t drive more than 5 miles without picking up something on our obscure static channel we searched so hard for.  The drive from VA to TX was filled with a lot of channel surfing… and NOT for a good top 40 station.

Now, people have suggested that I get a white noise machine, and I do have one for him that has been referred to by many moms as “baby crack” which plays the noises  of a heartbeat, rainstorm, ocean waves, and lullabies, but it’s not Kendall’s thing.  My kid has a thing for appliances.

I finally had a revelation a couple weeks ago after pondering how to record the sound of our vacuum to play off our radio in an effort to avoid an electrical fire.  The solution was so simple that I felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner.  I ran to the computer, pulled up Itunes and searched for vacuum sounds.  What do you fucking know?!  There is a WHOLE CD of appliance noises dedicated to helping babies sleep!  For $1.98 I downloaded the noise of a vacuum and the noise of a hair dryer (about 5 minutes each).  I burned three CDs – one for each car and one for the house.

So on our 10 hour drive to St. Louis last weekend I made sure to bring the new CD.  We listened to that damn thing probably 7 out of the ten hours, and the majority of the way back home.  I may have the blaring hum of the hair dryer stuck in my head for the next 10 years, but it was better than flipping back and forth between radio stations trying to avoid random tidbits of Polka and Tejano that would come through.  Now, I wish I could tell you that this was the magic potion that stopped him from crying every time, but I could not be so lucky.  We still had to jiggle his carseat to get him to settle down, and only when we could get him nice and sleepy did the noises work, but it was worth it for that small little bit of sanity we could reclaim.

12 weeks 3 days old

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