I’m working at a different hospital this week. It’s a place that does not afford me the privilege of a parking garage. This took a most unfortunate turn today, in this blistering 103 degree Oklahoma hellbeast misery. I’m running late to pick up the kid from daycare as always, with approximately 24 minutes to make an 18 minute drive (if everything goes my way, a 24 minute drive if it doesn’t). Thankfully they are always kind. I pull open the driver’s side door to throw my crap across the seats, and am immediately knocked back by a blast of ammonia smell, concentrated by the convective energy of a thousand suns. My nose hairs are immediately singed off, and I lose at least half an eyebrow. What. The. Eff. Did a rabid raccoon somehow crawl under the hood and die, expelling only the contents of it’s urinary tract and that alone? No, couldn’t be that. Did I somehow sleepwalk last night and power-scrub the seats with actual straight-up industrial-grade ammonia? Hell no, not a chance. Then it hits me, minute 4 of the drive, mid-gag; she’s been peeing in the car seat literally every single day this week on the five minute ride home (because the daycare teachers have been fooled into thinking that she’s potty-trained, as she’s wily and she holds her bladder much of the day, then lies and tells them she’s peeing on the potty and they believe her cherubic a$$ because of course they do; then she just waits until her naptime pull-up to pee, and they think she’s almost all the way there). I’ve washed the fabric car seat liner every single day this week, but I’ve failed to check under the seat for a worse problem than a small pee situation. And this has proven to be a near fatal error. I get to the daycare parking lot and confirm the catastrophic situation: there is a veritable puddle of partially-evaporated ultra-concentrated heated urine, pooled in the amazing Brica car seat protector, seemingly miraculously contained under the car seat. And it is cloudy secondary to mixing with a dissolved Pepperidge Farm goldfish and an organic pomegranate blueberry fruit snack ???? I die a little inside and try not to burst into tears. Of course, my husband unexpectedly having to go out of town has happened to coincide with the teachers at the school and my kid both converging on this particular week as the penultimate potty training moment. And she is taking it seriously. I get inside and am shocked to see her in the same clothes that I dropped her off in. Holy s***, this is remarkable. She has made some serious progress. She sees me and, rather than running straight at me full speed like a caged animal set free, she instead screams at me “I don’t like you, get away from me!!” and hugs the teacher’s leg. As I suspect, she has to poop and has for about 24 hours, and she is not happy. We get home, and she goes straight for her new pink potty ladder with bear-shaped handles and climbs straight up and pees in the potty. Then ten minutes later, she tells me she needs to poop on the potty and tries really hard to get over that toddler’s-mental-pooping-into-an-open-void hurdle for a few minutes, before giving up and asking for a pull-up. This is a huge leap forward in potty-training-purgatory-circles-of-hell. I put her in front of StoryBots with a plate of all of her favorite extremely-low-calorie foods that are the only things she eats, and I set about Cloroxing away my troubles. I poured vinegar and baking soda on this beast, let it sit, and then rinsed. It still had a whiff of urine, so I decided - what do I have to lose? I’ll throw it in the washer, worst thing that happens is I have to buy another. And it came out great! Odor-free, and wholly intact. I couldn’t be happier, this seat protector saved me from having to put a brick on the accelerator and Thelma-and-Louising my car straight off a cliff. Buy this now.
