What do you get when...

Question: What do you get when you take one lone Goldfish cracker that has accidentally fallen under the seat of your car and add a few drops of water that have leaked from your child's water bottle?

Answer: An odor so foul that the preschool director that takes your children out of the car at drop-off in the mornings, shudders when she sees your car pull in the drive-through.

Yesterday I was determined to find the source of the odor and get rid of it. At first I thought it was the container of blue cheese that had unknowingly been left in the car from the previous days grocery shopping trip.

But alas, after removing the container and silently seething that I could be so stupid and waste $3.50, the offending smell remained. (Why is blue cheese so expensive anyway?)

I knew it wasn't the blue cheese because the smell had been in the car long before that shopping trip.

The bottle of Febreeze that I had been using to mask the smell was almost empty so I decided I really needed to search in earnest for the odor. After checking all the usual locations (under the car seats, in the cup holders), I determined that I needed to check "the secret location" for the source of the smell.

In our SUV, when the third row seat is folded down flat, it is covered, making a flat trunk area. When this cover is pulled back, all sorts of surprises that have rolled under the second row seat toward the third row seat are exposed.

In addition to crayons, straws and Bionicle pieces, there were approximately 20 Goldfish crackers floating around. One had landed in the bracket/bolt that secures the second row seat to the floor. Unfortunately some water managed to land in this bracket on top of this poor little Goldfish and created a stagnant little pond. The Goldfish started to break down and decay in just these few drops of water.

The smell this rotting Goldfish had created was so bad that my daughter thought I had loaded the weekly trash into the car to make a run to the dump.

The stink has now been removed - just in time for the last two days of preschool. Better late than never I suppose.

It's a good thing the preschool director has never been in my house though!