I am one of those weird moms whose car is uncluttered and clean. I'm almost embarrassed about it. I hesitate to open the door to my mini van within sight of normal moms. As soon as the door to my mini-van slides open to reveal a crumb free, clutter free interior, I can see Normal Mom's jaw start to drop. My car is freak show clean most of the time, but as it's mostly a vehicle for transporting 3-year-old twin boys, it's not been easy to keep it this way. As soon as the crumbs start to blanket the carpet of my car, I'm on it, vacuuming the interior like a madwoman until I can get to the car wash.
Today, it rained just enough to keep the car wash closed for business. Cracker crumbs were everywhere, on the floor, in the car seats - it was driving me nuts. My boys were at Grandma's for the day, so when I spied one of those coin operated car washes while driving around this afternoon, I prayed to the loose change God that I'd have enough quarters to use the beautiful industrial vacuum cleaner. In my OCD mind, I could see all those crumbs being sucked up like tiny magnets. Vroooosh! Ah, nirvana.
It costs 6 quarters for 5 minutes of therapy vacuuming. With 7 quarters on hand, I was in luck! I quickly stuffed my gym bag, my mom bag, and my bag of non-perishable groceries into the trunk and got to work sucking up all sorts of crumbs. This was a super, duper strength vacuum, capable of devouring small children and pets. I started with the area beneath the second row seats as it was just littered with crumbs. Then, I got greedy and thought I'd briskly jab the nozzle beneath the crammed space of the third row seating when I heard the vacuum start to choke. The offending piece was actually the ball of string from one of my boys' beloved dollar store kites, which I had tossed into the back seats and (gasp) forgotten about. I tried to pull the string out but more string kept getting sucked in. Soon the whole damned plastic Batman kite was stuck at the mouth of the angry nozzle. String was everywhere, wrapped around both kites, tangled in the seats, and half-sucked into the vacuum.
Time was ticking, counting down precious minutes. How much time was left? Two minutes, perhaps? I still had the front seats to do! Irritated, I ran around to the other side of the car, trailing the kite and its tangled string along with me, the winder bobbling in the nozzle, mocking me. As the final seconds expired, the vacuum sputtered to a stop, leaving behind a few stubborn crumbs, two broken kites and a mile of tangled string in its wake.
I tossed the kites into the trashcan, making my peace with this small sacrifice for a temporarily clean and kid-free zen-like car. Surely, the normal moms will stare but I am loving my very clean car.
Original Chalk and Cheese Chronicles blog post.
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