Is your bathroom sink nastier than your toilet?

 In September of 2010, I was seven months pregnant with baby boy #3. Because of this pregnancy, I was hospitalized for a staph infection. In the course of my four days of being intravenously pumped full of antibiotics, test results indicated that the infection was MRSA—in my mind, the mother of all staff infections. That result launched my identity as a germaphobe!

 Since my stint in the hospital, my vigilance to eradicating harmful germs and bacteria in the home has slackened somewhat. Okay, a lot. But to this day, hydrogen peroxide is my primary household cleaner. I keep a spray bottle of it in the kitchen and bathrooms. To me, there is something very satisfying about the fizzing and foaming that you get with peroxide. As a nine-year-old girl, I remember my fascination with the way my newly pierced earlobes would foam up when I cleaned them with a peroxide-drenched cotton ball. I never got over that fascination.

In fact, the first time I sprayed the fixtures on one of my sinks and saw the surprisingly large amount of resulting foam, I couldn't wait to spray down the toilet and see all the foam that THAT surely would produce!

However, I was sorely disappointed. When, for the first time, I sprayed down the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is primarily used by little boys—very messy little boys, no foam. Nothing. And you can't tell me that, with three male toilet users in my home, my toilets are cleaner than my sinks! I've done a little poking around to figure out why my toilets won't fizz and have only determined that apparently something builds up on my sinks (and doesn't build up on my toilets) that reacts with the peroxide. My guess is that it is saliva related.

Do me a little favor, would you? Try this experiment in your home with a spray bottle of peroxide. If you have different results than mine, please let me know.

Oh, and if you are interested in the different uses of hydrogen peroxide, Google it. Turns out that I'm not the only one out there with a somewhat strange obsession with what causes peroxide to fizz.