I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Frugal Tip: Paste-Type Toothpaste to the Rescue

My family is traveling from the midwest to the east coast for Christmas.  All of our extended family (both sides) is all on the east coast, so we travel there to spend Christmas with our loved ones.  Because of this, we have our own small family Christmas early at our own home.  My spouse and I previously decided that yesterday was that day, and Saturday helped our kids wrap presents for each other so that Sunday we would have everything from us and the kids to each other under the tree.

The one present that my four year old son got yesterday that wasn’t from us was an easel.   My parents got that for him, and sent it here instead of to their house because it would have been too big to bring back in our car. The easel is a chalkboard on one side and a dry erase board on the other, that has a roll of easel paper at the top you can pull down over the dry erase board.  We loaded the easel up with crayons on the paper side and chalk on the chalkboard side, and my son was good to go.

Except we made the mistake of not explaining well enough, and he tried to color on the chalkboard side with crayon.  Oops!

And while I was distracted looking at that, my two year old daughter got a hold of the offending crayon,  and went on a rampage of her own, coloring on my spouse’s office chair, a bookcase, a wall, one of her riding toys, and probably other places I haven’t discovered yet.

Not wanting my son’s easel ruined the first day, I googled how to remove crayon from chalkboard.  I found many many recommendations, and the simplest (to me) was to rub it with paste-type toothpaste.  I have a lot of toothpaste I’ve collected for free over the past several months by shopping for deals at CVS and Walgreens, so I went through it and found the lone tube of paste-type.  We prefer gel here for our teeth.  Heh.

And lo and behold, the toothpaste took the crayon right off the chalkboard!  As well as everywhere else I found my daughter’s scribbling – walls, bookcases, plastic, even some wood.  Since my daughter is a BIG scribbler, this is a great find for me.

So the next time I come across a free toothpaste deal, I’ll be stocking up on the paste style and putting it into my cleaning cupboard.  Hopefully the one tube will last until at least then!