Wash Me

Last night Erin suggested that it was time to clean out our minivan.

"Oh, and you think I'm brilliant and have movie star quality good looks. Very funny."

"No, really. We should start tonight and finish this weekend."

After checking both her forehead for fever and my shoes for signs of hell going arctic, I enthusiastically agreed with her. Car cleanliness, the bane of many marriages, has always been somewhat of an issue for us.

When we were dating (the timeline of which is also a source of great debate) Erin drove a lovely green Toyota Camry. It was an automatic with a sunroof, 6 cylinder engine, CD changer, and a variety of soups and cracker combinations in the backseat that would make the Golden Corral jealous.

Pair this with a wide selection of slightly moldy Tupperware products, a few empty beverage containers, and a half eaten bag of Golden Grahams, and you get a picture of Erin's Camry. I tried to clean it once, and something under the seats bit me and growled.

In all fairness, Erin does a remarkable job of keeping our house and child clean. Very rarely does Grant smell more foul than his father, so I applaud her efforts. But somewhere in our genetic makeup, women just don't feel a need to keep their cars clean. Our minivan is no exception.

As we dumped the various toys and used-to-be books out of the backseat, we began to notice a multitude of stains on the floormats. A little juice here, a little mac and cheese there. We decided to actually remove Grant's carseat for the sake of completeness, underneath which we found approximately two pounds of partially masticated cookies and crackers.

(In Grant's world, crackers are called cookies most of the time. This is an effort on Erin's part to convince Grant that a Ritz or Saltine is the best tasting cookie-like object on the planet. When she does give him a cookie, I believe she calls it "sugar coated crack.")

There were also remnants of McDonald's ice cream cones and a few socks under Grant's car seat. By this time, Grant was running around our driveway in merely a diaper, so we paused until the weekend. I'm hoping to find an iPod or something I can take on the Antiques Roadshow when we return to the task.