Being a mom seems so easy, so natural, so effortless for some women. When it comes to feeding, clothing, roofing, and educating my children, I certainly meet the world’s minimum daily recommended allowance. Beyond that, I struggle, I obsess, I cringe. Tucson is a hard place to live for the mother of a kid with a dust allergy. I’m sure this is hard on my son too, but this is my blog. If Parrish wants to post about the cough that keeps him up all night when I don’t manage a thorough dusting, he has his own blog.

Today I learned that along with being slow to care about the PLUs on produce and not playing Baby Einstein to the zygotes I gestated, my dust bunny ranch is ruining my kids. I don’t know why I bothered to breast feed when I was just forcing fire retardants down those innocent, vulnerable baby throats.

Apparently, those dark dwelling dust bunnies have their own culture, whole lives built up around a sedentary lifestyle and, oddly enough, disco. I should have known by the way they swirl around my broom. Some people think of dust bunnies as pets, but dust bunnies have a darker side. They don’t merely reproduce. They mutate – first as hibernating bears and then as devils. I believe it. Dust bunnies are evil!

American Standard, who would like to sell you air quality products, conducted a 20 city census. Check out their Dust Bunny Barometer to see how concerned you should be about your domestic neglect and its possible poisoning of your babies.

If I were a better mom, I would eradicate dust bunnies in the home. Dust bunny removal requires a specialist, I’ve decided. A Hoover engineer well versed in the use of one of those dust sucky things. This ain’t no DIY project. I should probably be able to round up the bunnies and combine them with dryer lint to knit reusable grocery sacks, but I’m not that mom. I’m the mom that waits for snotty noses and lethargy before moving aside heavy furniture.

(Art stolen from MYRANT. That’s my new vision of a dust bunny full of crap that could irritate your kids’ respiratory system at the least and give them cancer at the worst.)