The smell in my car was God awful and day by day it got worse. (The only smell I can compare it to is a Port-a-Potty on an August day that 90,000 Nascar fans with bad aim have all used.)
On day six, the smell was making it unsafe for me to drive. I was positive that I was going to pass out any second from the noxious fumes and cause a major accident. So I got a garbage bag and decided to clean my Honda up. I would find the source of the smell and remove it.
Easier said than done. My backseat looked like a garage sale for kids toys covered in a blanket made of Cheerios.
See, my daughter doesn't like the car. Twenty seconds into any excursion and the crying starts at decibiles that, frankly, hurt. (Now, I don't blame her, she has no idea where we're going or how long it's going to be, she's bored as hell from reading the same six books in the backseat nine hundred times each, and she's tied down like Hannibal Lector.)
So what do we do to quiet her down? One of two things:
1) We find a school bus and we tailgate the shit out of it. Then we give stream of conscious color commentary on every aspect of the school bus as fast as we can. "The kids are on the bus! The kids go to school on the bus! The bus is yellow! The bus driver is out of AA, etc..."
2) In the event of no school buses to tailgate, we ply her with food. Cheerios, Fig Newmans, apples, pretzels*, etc... (My daughter really likes food. Every day she eats like tommorow is Yom Kippur.)
When Remy is done with the food, she throws it on the floor.
So when I started wading through all the food, I couldn't account for the smell. I don't care how long Cheerios and Fig Newmans have been in the backseat, unless they're mixed with feces and milk that expired six weeks ago, they should not make THAT smell.
And then I found the feces and the expired milk. The feces lived in a diaper under a Maisy book, but that was actually the easy the part. The dagger was the milk. It was festering in a sippy cup under the seat and it wasn't milk anymore. Once upon a time it was milk. Now it was angry, gray cottage cheese. It was assisted suicide medication. It was weapons of mass destruction. It WAS the smell.
I threw the whole sippy cup out, used the crappy vaccum hose thing at the car wash, and it didn't take long before my car smelled as good as a 2001 Honda Civic as ever smelled. I also decided I was not going to give my daughter food in the car ever again.
But less than forty eight hours later, I couldn't find a school bus.
*My mother is reading this and having a heart attack. She would probably never say this, but I'm pretty sure she's thinking, "You give her pretzels? In a moving car! She's not even 2! She'll choke any minute! Why not just give her marbles to eat!"
