The Honest Company Honestly Makes Me Want To Clean Stuff (Plus, a $500 Giveaway!)

This is a sponsored post written by MyBrownBaby on behalf of The Honest Company.

Be clear: Bettye and Jimy Millner believed hard and with all their might that the best way to keep their baby girl out of trouble was to keep me as close to the hip as possible. This involved cleaning. Lots of it. So much that I started to believe that, surely, I was the Black Cinderella. I dusted, vacuumed, polished, hosed down the kitchen, washed, folded and ironed laundry, mopped. And when that was done, I hit both bathrooms, and, on extra special weekends—usually when a party that they didn’t want me to go to was involved—I got the extra special task of organizing clothes bureaus and closets.

Yeah. My social life? Non-existent. But the house was spotless—my cleaning game, proper. And I learned some pretty valuable lessons in the process: a) making tweens/teens clean instead of party can most certainly keep nerdy kids out of trouble; b) kids won’t break up into little, teeny weeny pieces from being required to contribute to the upkeep of the homes they live in, and, c) while I have no interest in making my own kids slave around the house to keep out of trouble, they do have a duty to help out around the house because their mama is a writer, not a maid.

So the girlpies clean. Kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms—the works. Not like Cinderella, mind you—or Denene-ella. But they do help.

Thing is, when I first put the dishcloth, sponges and toilet scrubbers in my daughters’ hands, I thought just as long and hard about what they would be cleaning with as I did what, exactly, they would be charged with cleaning. They are, after all, still my babies, and though no one worried about the industrial-strength chemicals I was dipping my hands into when I was a kid—nobody really considered such things in the 80s—I am much more mindful about the cleaning products I let my daughters use. I want what they clean with to be gentle on their skin and free of fumes that upset stomachs and give headaches and cinch nose hairs and that get the house, like, clean. This, I think, is not to much to ask for.

Which brings me to my latest obsession: The Honest Company.

The Honest Company is the brainchild of actress/mom Jessica Alba and Christopher Gavin, the former CEO of Healthy Child, Healthy World. The two put their wonder powers together to create the family brand, which aims to bring effective, unquestionably safe, eco-friendly, beautiful, convenient and affordable products for babies on up.

A couple of weeks ago, The Honest Company asked me to pick out $35 worth of items from The Honest Company website to try out at my place. I was quite surprised by all that $35 could get me: I chose the Lemon Verbena dish soap, foaming hand soap, and the bathroom, multi-surface, toilet and glass + window cleaners—enough products to get our place top-to-bottom clean. I’ve had only a few days with the products, but I like what I’ve seen so far: the hand soap is foamy and pleasant smelling (which encourages the girlpies to wash their grubby hands), the dish detergent worked well on our Taco Night plates and bowls (I didn’t have to use the whole bottle to get the dinner dishes clean), the glass + window cleaner got toothpaste spray off the bathroom mirror (no streaks!) and the multi-surface cleaner worked well on our kitchen countertops (without my having to put any muscle and elbows all up in it). The bathroom and toilet cleaners will get their own workout this weekend, when the girls tackle their bathroom.

In other words, I’m impressed. The Honest Company products delivered the clean I wanted. Plus, bonus points: The Honest Company says that its bath and body products are natural, non-toxic, hypoallergenic and pH-balanced, while its line f advanced plant-based cleaning products are tough on dirt and safe for the girlpies (and me) to use.

So let’s recap, shall we? The Honest Company products are affordable, natural and safe enough for the kids to use and, on top of that, get the job done.

Borrowing a phrase from one of our favorite street thespians, Sean P. Diddy Combs: Can’t stop, won’t stop. Eh eh, eh eh.

Want some Honest Company products in your life? They’ve got plenty to choose from besides the cleaning products: there are baby and body products, diapers, and even health and wellness nutrition for those of us trying to get our insides as healthy as our outsides. How can you get your hands on some of your own, you ask? Well, you could buy some of your own: take a look at The Honest Company website and after you’ve picked out some nifty products for yourself—check out the sample paks!—use this equally nifty coupon code to get $10 off your minimum purchase of $40: Sway10off40. (This coupon code applies to U.S. and Canadian residents only—one per customer, valid for first-time orders only—and expires November 17, 2013, so get to ordering.)

Or, you can take your chances and enter to win a $500 The Honest Company gift certificate. Of course, you’ve got to play to win; here’s how to enter:

The giveaway will be open from midnight PST on November 12 to midnight PST on November 21.

Participants may enter by following the instructions in the Rafflecopter (see below)

One winner (out of all giveaways running on 15 sites) will receive a gift card to The Honest Company (a $500 value).

The winner will be announced on November 22, 2013 via The Honest Company’s Facebook page.

Good luck with the drawing. And if you order up a few items from The Honest Company—or you’ve used some already—come back to MyBrownBaby and let me know in the comments sections how you liked them.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of The Honest Company.
For more information, visit http://www.honest.com.