Yesterday I conquered a task that, should I ever have to perform it again, you may want to have a straight jacket at the ready.  Because this feat brought me to the brink of losing my sanity, and I doubt I can face this challenge again without needing a heavy prescription and clinical surveillance.

Let me explain.  We came home on Saturday from a week-long car trip.  Our car afterwards looked like our kids have ripped open every bag of snacks your brought along and sprinkled their contents all over every surface as if it were fairy dust.

So, after laundry was washed and put away, my next assignment was tackling the car seats.

Besides the Microcosm of Crumbs that has set up shop in the fabric, I was also concerned that they might be covered in dog or cat hair from the kids’ frolics with my parents pets.  If I haven’t mentioned this already, my husband is allergic to most animals.  Hence his nickname, Bubble Boy.

But I digress.

Getting back to the car seats.  While my son’s seat was pretty easy to dismantle, I also had the pleasure of taking apart my daughter’s Britax Boulevard.

I thought it would be easy.  I thought I could wiggle the cover off in less than a minute and throw it in the wash.

I thought wrong.

You basically need a degree in engineering to disassemble this sucker.

First you have to remove the headrest cover, which hides a styrofoam foundation that’s nice and easy to rip in half.  Then there are tricks to getting the back cover off, and everything has to be aligned just so:  the head rest, the opening, Jupiter and Uranus.

Once you get the back cover over the headrest, you’re only halfway to success.  In order to remove it all the way, you have to release the harness straps from the back.  Sounds simple enough, no?  But when I turned the seat over to investigate, I was met with a black sheet of plastic that was blocking my access.

Mocking me.  Laughing in the face of my frustration and saying “You think you’re so smart?  Figure THIS shit out, woman!”

It doesn’t pry off easy.  And then I got smart and read the instructions.  YES, it took me this long to crack out the manual and read along.  I’ve put IKEA furniture together, dammit!  This should be child’s play.  And yet, there are 14 steps to removing the cover in the manual.  FOURTEEN FRIGGIN’ STEPS.

Once I was able unhook the harness straps, the rest came off as quickly as a college Senior’s bikini top at Spring Break.  I threw that sucker in the wash, laundry recommendations be damned.

I mean, c’mon.  The label says “hand wash only”.  Are you serious?  Hand wash, my ass.  This was just the fall-out from a cross country road trip and years of neglect.  What if one of my kids puked all over the thing?

After the cover was washed and dry, I went to go put it back on and thought I should maybe wipe down inside.  You know, for a nice clean start.

Holy goldfish.  There was a thick layer of juice/crackers/raisins/cheese puffs that had coalesced and coagulated into a sticky bar of crap.  It was Dis. Gust. Ing.  I had to exhume it with a butter knife, falling out of the crack in one large, foul sheet.

I finally put the whole thing back on and took a step back to admire my work.  Then I realized why it didn’t look right.  I forgot to put the harness straps through headrest.

I contemplated skipping this step and seeing what happens.  But seeing as how the safety of my precious cargo was at stake, I made the responsible choice to take whole thing apart again and do it correctly.

Because I’m giving like that. I will remind my daughter of this turning point every time I buckle her in her seat from here on out.

Now that the seat is clean and reassembled, karma or Murphy’s law would dictate that as soon as I publish this, my daughter will puke her guts out in this car seat.

Better start looking for Toys R Us coupons, because there’s no way hell I’m cleaning this again.