When you have kids, it’s hard to imagine your car ever being clean. Toys, food, juice, books, wrappers, kleenex…there’s always something to clean up and it’s hard to keep things smelling fresh.

I had the ultimate car cleaning challenge this weekend when my youngest child threw up on the way to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. Even when we cleaned up the vomit and shampooed the seat, the smell lingered. I’m not a huge fan of commercial air fresheners because they’re full of chemicals, but I was tempted to use them. Then my mom told me a strange trick she heard from her Uncle Don, one of those incredible old men with an encyclopedic memory. It involved a combination of sprinkling baking soda over the interior and leaving an open bag of untreated charcoal (the kind you use in the BBQ) in the car for a few days.

It sounds weird, but let me just say, so far so good. The charcoal/baking soda method seems to have absorbed that lingering acid smell, which would have been hard to cover up with fragrance. My husband and I are relieved that we can step in the car without a reminder of my daughter’s incident.