Sunday: car detailing occurring one hour earlier apparently

I want to be clear. When it is possible to go online on a Saturday night and make an appointment to have someone come out to your house on Sunday morning and detail a car including “vomit remediation” and yes, I don’t know exactly what that is even though I definitely need it, or rather, the car in question does, and that person then arrives on Sunday morning exactly one hour earlier, it is tempting to complain.

And yet, I am not complaining. I’m not overjoyed about being awake right now, because it took me a while to settle down and fall asleep, but I am very happy that someone very diligent is doing things to the inside of that car. Fingers crossed.

ETA:

Car now smells like cleaner. I _think_ the vomit smell is entirely gone.

Also, the car is clean inside and out. Very, very, very clean. Like, cleaner than the dealer gets it after a service, which is saying something.

To Recap My Weekend

Some messages (lightly edited to remove names and to correct really blatant grammar errors) I blew up a friend’s feed with after they sent me this link:

https://www.aarparrow.com/family-fatherhood/i-was-a-latchkey-kid-so-why-am-i-a-helicopter-parent

The article is fine. I am not.

As a parent of a driver, I will tell you that I have discovered a new very upsetting thing that can happens with a teen driver wandering around having fun. Everyone in my family is lactose intolerant (I am milk allergic as well), so we normally all have pills with us for people to take (I carry the pills, even tho I obviously never need to use them because I just don’t consume milk products) when they decide to have milk products that contain substantial lactose.

Well, my son ran out, and he chose to have ice cream after dinner anyway and then drive home. He became nauseous (predictable) and threw up all over the inside of the car. On his nice leather jacket. On his brand new shoes. On the expensive jeans that were only a couple months old, and we I made a point of teaching him how to wash in a way that would not destroy them (I normally don’t bother to teach finicky laundry care).

I went over the Let’s Say You Think You Might Throw Up protocol, car edition, because there were _three_ emesis bags _in that car_, and clearly, he’d made some kind of attempt to access one, but had _not_ just pulled over and thrown up onto the ground. He apparently thought you had to go off into the woods. No. Open door. Vomit on ground. Any ground. Grass. Dirt. Road. Sidewalk. I don’t care. The climate impact of vomit on walking surface — any walking surface — is way, way less than vomit all over the interior of an electric BMW, even one that is 8 years old.

Since we learned all this when he arrived at home last night, and the car detailing place we are familiar with is not open on Sundays, my husband’s plan was to just let it sit until Monday morning, put a towel down and drive it over to the detailing place Monday. I was like, absolutely not. I went out with paper towel, a scraper and a watering can, realized the scope of the problem, and returned with an ultimatum: I needed suction and a brush, and he could pick which suction appliance was going to be hoovering up vomit. He opted for the steam cleaner which is older than our marriage, and which has never functioned during our marriage (other than to deter me from buying or renting another steam cleaner when I thought steam cleaning something might be useful), and which died and flipped the GFI upon being turned on, producing enough black smoke of the Power Strip Died a Horrible Death flavor to set off multiple household smoke alarms.

So: to recap. We are now at, vomited on car interior, and interior of house is probably not safe to breathe in.

Windows opened, fans deployed, furnace turned off (it was low 30s / high 20s outside at this point), I’m still using paper towels, and the shopvac is _finally_ deployed. No suction to speak of. Filter had just been swapped, now it was removed. Still no suction. Hose swapped. Finally, suction. I find a plastic and nylon hand brush that has been used to remove truly disgusting things from the bottom of shoes and been cleaned to the point you would never know that … repeatedly … and proceeded to remove enough of the vomit that I felt like I could take the mat out and clean that out in the sink.

When I was mostly done (or taking a break, I forget), I got my iPad, googled (not in quotes) “car detailing vomit near me” and found a place that is open by appointment on Sundays and _will come to my house_. I hit the button to schedule an appointment, decide 8 am on a Sunday morning after this kind of a Saturday night is Way Too Early, and opt for 10 am. Some hours later, appointment is confirmed. This morning, the person showed up at 9 am, a full hour early.

The car is now super clean, but also stinks to high heaven of cleaner. My husband thinks the way to mitigate this is to plug the car in and run the climatization system. I let him do it. It got worse. He’s out of the house, so I’ve got the garage door open and the windows open. We’ll see how it goes.

Part of the kitchen — where the steam cleaner died hideously — still smells slightly of black smoke, but the rest of the house is mostly okay. We’ve cleared out enough trash and gotten through enough laundry so I’m no longe tracking down hidden sources of Eau de Vomette.

I got my son’s shoes and jacket from him, cleaned them further, and hung them out in the garage. There’s still vomit in the zipper, and I’ve tried two brushes and I’m just not sure how good that’s ever going to get.

My major takeaway — other than reviewing the How To Not Vomit In a Car protocol with my son, to make sure he fully understands the decision tree — is that my husband could use some additional parenting.

My husband _knows_ that his sense of smell is permanently damaged (has been since before we got together). And yet he persists in Oh No You’re Not Smelling That to me (to be fair, to everyone else, too). Needs Additional Parenting.

One of the reasons I will not live in a house with a well anymore is because he shocked the well once while we were living there, failed to clear enough of the chlorine out, insisted that he had and he couldn’t smell it anymore even tho I said I could really smell it a lot in the tap, I took a shower and washed my hair and had to have it mostly cut off because yeah, there was still a ton of chlorine in there. Significant skin repercussions as well. That was really early on in our relationship, and honestly, that Oh No You Are Just Imagining That Smell should never have recurred. I stopped arguing with him, but I’m now thinking that more proactive training may be required to deter future commissions of this particular … behavior.

But you know, my son keeps eating ice cream when he doesn’t have lactose pills with him … and then throwing up (usually, fortunately, into the toilet).

In fairness to my husband, he did anticipate that the detailer would likely use scented product. The reason he wanted to wait until Monday is because he knows that operation has unscented products. I asked husband to get up in time to have the conversation with the detailer on arrival, unfortunately, he chose not to get up when the detailer arrived an hour early.