As we’re taking my car to airport thought I’d better quickly get it looking vaguely clean That’s 3 hours of my life I’m never getting back!

The cleanliness of my car is a point of constant contention between J and I.  Not a major one, just something that he can use to berate me with when he wants to score points.

The point being that I find it almost impossible to keep the car clean carrying the children about as I do.

J is far more fastidious about his car than I am.  in fact he's far more interested in cars in general than I am.  He buys car magazines, gets the right cleaning fluid for the washers, bans the children from eating in the car, remarks upon new styles, designs, types of car on the road.

I can tell you my car is blue.  I think it's French and it has two pretty useless cup holders and quite a good stereo.  I do allow the children to eat in the car and I only notice other cars if the are either hurtling towards me on the wrong side of the road or pulling out in front of me on roundabouts.

Anyway, the need to clean the car before we all travel to the airport tomorrow reminded me of my experience with my previous car.

I had a four wheel drive when we first adopted our son.  Never having that clean a car, having a toddler in tow too ensured that it was pretty disgusting within a short period and stayed that way.

inevitably I always carried snacks around in it, keeping the generally in the box between the front seats.  

After about a year I began to notice that some of the various chocolate and snack bars I carried in the central box had been nibbled.  The teeth marks looked small, but not so small that they couldn't reasonably have been as a result of our toddler son snacking on them.

For a few weeks I would accuse our 4yo of snacking on the food in the car.  He'd swear it wasn't him.  In similar circumstances to today, I found myself needing to clean the car out.  In the process I found the normal pretty disgusting detritus associated with having a child in the car, chips, toffees, fruit gums under the seats.  Each of the discarded pieces of food had the same teeth marks in them though.  Further investigation also found various bits of shredded paper under the seats and secreted under the mats as well.

I thought I had better man up and show J.  Showing him the various evidence he looked horrified.  "Your car is SO disgusting, you have a mouse living in it!"

Oops!  At least I can be sure 7yo has good immunity from rodent diseases.