Product Review

People are all into lifehacks and what works best—especially mothers of toddlers. It's hard to find the right product for the right job. Being a mother of toddlers myself, I understand the struggle. You never know when you are gonna walk into crayon or who-knows-what on the wall. Now, there are plenty of complicated hacks on how to get crayon off the wall, from using a hair driers and paper towels to just plain painting over it.

And even though it may seem easy to keep all the crayons high up when not in use, or to watch your children more diligently, stuff still happens. There is still that one crayon from Denny's that made its way into the house, and let's be honest, NO ONE remembers the Denny's crayons. We're too busy making sure the shoes are still on and nobody forgot the leftovers in the car.

So today we are going to discuss the "Magic Eraser," typically made by Mr. Clean, and toddler wall painting.

This product claims to have a magical cleaning power with nothing but water. I decided to investigate. Today of all days, I found pencil marks on the wall of my youngest's bedroom. But how do you clean pencil? If you use a normal pencil eraser, it smudges into the paint and can take hours to take off, and you certainly can't melt it and wipe it off like crayon.

I rummaged through my drawers to see what I had on hand. I found detergents and soaps and *gasp* a magic eraser! At this point, I'm happy to have found something to use.

So I wet, squeeze the excess water out, and get to work.

Now, I do wanna make a point that we live in a rental home and that we've already had an issue with marker/crayons, and we already had to paint over the kids' walls before. So honestly, I have no problem making mistakes, because they already know how to fix it.

While using the damp sponge, I did notice a few things:

• There was also yellow crayon on the wall; the cheap kind from Denny's
• The eraser took off most of both
• Even though I wasn't putting a lot of pressure on the sponge itself, it was still squishing down very thin and deteriorating easily
• The eraser was also removing a thin layer of paint with everything else.

Looking at the wall now, I don't see a problem. There is no obvious sign that some paint was removed and the marks are completely untraceable. As for the factors of the sponge deteriorating, I honestly don't know why it did that. The wall I used it on isn't textured or anything, and because of the layer of paint being removed, I had to make sure I washed my hands thoroughly.

Overall, I do rate this a four out of possible five, mostly because it accomplished what I set out to do. But let's go over the pros and cons.

Pros:

• Removed both pencil and crayon
• Dried relatively quickly
• No foul chemical smell
• Easily used
• Multi use

Cons:

• Removes paint (not recommended for areas with thin paint)
• Deteriorates easily (it literally started falling apart in my hand)
• Not reusable because ^

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Now, I do want to make it clear that I only used it on the wall and have yet to really try it on anything else.

The only reason this is is because I, personally, haven't really found a use for it besides this, although there are plenty of uses. I just wanted my experience to be known because someone with thin paint may not want a splotch on their wall. Not to mention repainting an entire room thanks to one splotch can get pretty pricey depending on the primer and type of paint you get.

Happy Hacks, everyone

-T