Eat your greens, don't breathe 'em

The great thing about using a steam vaporiser when you or your child has a stuffy nose, is that it really does help with the breathing.

The dangerous thing about the steam vaporiser is that there's a greatly increased risk of breeding mould on your walls if you use it a lot and can't provide adequate ventilation or clean the vaporise thoroughly.

The Little Madam is just getting over her 6th cold since June, so you can imagine that our vaporiser has been working overtime. I had noticed that having it on all night resulted in damp walls and furniture the following morning, so had made sure that her room was aired out during the day. Well, as much as possible considering the heater was on all the time and I like to keep the door closed to minimise heat loss.

But it wasn't enough. And I obviously haven't been cleaning the vaporiser out nearly enough, because this morning I discovered a thick layer of the nasty green-black stuff on the wall opposite TLM's cot, all around the bedroom window and coating the block-out curtain.

A mould allergy is a pretty likely culprit as a cause of TLM's worrying wheeze, too.

So as soon as the boy got out of bed I sent him to work on cleaning out TLM's room with a bleach solution. We're also going to pull up the (green) carpet, which is probably camoflaging it's own population of spores, and do a general declutter.

So I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that by this time next week we'll have a one-year-old with lovely clean airways, unbothered by fungal things and dust mite poos.