Week 40: 1969 Triumph TR6

Exhaust by DaddysTinyCars

Gentlemen and Gentlewomen, start your engines!

Now shut them off again, because your four-year-old is suddenly yelling incoherently with a mix of fear and horror and the car smells like a rare, horrendously stinky cheese when no cheese smell previously existed.

How, you wonder, could this have happened? He was in his car seat for 30 seconds, only enough time for you to get to the driver side, close your door, and turn the key.

You leap from your seat in the off chance there is a real emergency, although what kind of emergency involving cheese you cannot imagine, and slide open the door of the van to find your son's hair dripping with some kind of acrid goo that is also on his shirt, face and hands.

You gag and feel sick. Now over the years you've changed thousands of diapers and cleaned up all colors and textures of kiddie throw-up, all without  gagging, so you know this is extreme.

"What happened?" you ask through wrinkled-nose face.

"My *sob* sippy cup EXPLODED!!" cries your dripping preschooler.

Sippy cup? He didn't have a sippy cup.

And then you understand.

You look at the ceiling of the van, which is also splattered with sour milk.

How long that sippy has been there you have no idea, but long enough to build so much pressure that MacGyver could have used it as a weapon.

 Next to him, the two-year-old looks on with big eyes, nonplussed by the dizzying stench.

You unbuckle the car seat, pull off the preschooler's shirt, and realize the few seconds of contact with the sour milk have actually allowed the cheese vomit odor to permeate into his skin.

You scoop him up, run him into the bathroom for a shower hose-down with the efficiency of a pit crew changing a tire, all the while asking your wife to watch out for the baby.

He's only getting to the second round of squawking about not wanting a shower when you're done and are pulling a clean shirt over his head.

You grab a wet towel on your way back out and smell the stink from the door -- that's the door of the house, not the van. Your wife has cleaned off the baby seat and put a towel down and you both work on the ceiling, but the smell is overpowering.

Your two-year-old laughs.

Click, snap, buckle, he is snapped in his stinky car seat and you are ready to go, off to your older son's baseball game only slightly off schedule.

Triumph! (and NOW you see the tie-in of the photo to this blog.)



Wait. Sniff. Does the little one need a new diaper?


The photo of this great Hot Wheels diecast courtesy of Phil Pekarcik, who also provided the sound effects. For the record, this is from the Hot Wheels 2009 New Models collection. I know I say this almost every week, but this is one of my favorites.