My mother in law called to say she was arriving one day early.

To say my house was not MIL ready would be a gross understatement.

As I started picking up toddler toys, cleaning toddler butt, recleaning the toddler toys after he drug them out again, in the back of my mind I knew that at some point I would actually have to CLEAN and not just push clutter under the bed and into closets.

As I tackled the guest bathroom – aka the lair of the MIL for the next 10 days, my trusty dusty anti bac wipe just wasn’t cutting it on a rust stain on the countertop.

Luckily, I had received a nice shiny new Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (MCME) in the mail two days ago. (I couldn’t make this up.) It had the Febreze fresh scent citrus & light which I could smell. through. the. box.

So I set the MCME to the task and went off to enjoy a well deserved beverage.

When I returned, this is what I saw.

Hm. Apparently I was going to have to ACTUALLY lift a finger to help the MCME do his job. No worries. Can do.

All righty then. I realized that while magic, I w0uld still need to be an active participant in this cleaning.

Here’s the result after the “soft cleaning side”

Here’s the result after the “tough erasing side” and a reasonable amount of elbow grease.

Score MCME 0, my non MIL ready home 1.

I moved on to the funky rusty funk around the drain in the tub.

After a swipe with the soft side….

And a swipe with the tough side ….

we were tied at MCME 1, my non MIL ready home 1. (My camera, on the other hand, gets a fat 0 – because for real, the drain looks way better than this photo shows.)

I headed downstairs to the evilest of all gunk in my home, the thing that continually thwarts my efforts of staying clean.

A single swipe with the soft side – viola – perfectly clean!

Final score MCME 2, my non MIL ready home 1. Winner – Mr. Clean Magic Eraser!

My take on it – I’d buy them, although I’ll pass on the Citrus & Light… that smell never did grow on me.

(Yup, BlogHer and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser sent me samples and paid me to review – which you probably guessed because girlfriend needs lots of motivation to clean the house. If you want to see more opinions and special tips – head to this BlogHer link.)