A Sad Story With a Happy Ending

The week before we went to Alberta, we were generously offered a Little Tykes toddler car bed. We gladly accepted. We weren't able to connect in person prior to our leaving, so the bed (which is plastic) was left safely on the back deck. Our landlords moved it into their garage for us, but sadly a cat sprayed it first. If you've never smelled cat spray, it has a very strong ammonia smell and it doesn't smell pleasant at all. Well, we googled a solution  - a mixture of vinegar and baking soda and my David scrubbed the bed. He sent me down to do a smell test and it smelled like vinegar to me. A quick rinse and up we felt like we could move it upstairs. David ran to Walmart and picked up a mattress and sheet, then cut a new base board and voila! The littles went to bed, Malachi excited about his big boy bed, and we called it done. Well, at about 4:30 AM, we woke up to the sound of Abigail getting sick in the bathroom. After she was cleaned up we went to put her back to bed and realized how BAAAAAD the bedroom smelled of cat spray. EWWWW! Poor Malachi lost his bed to an outdoor time out. Abigail got sick again and it suddenly became a looooong morning. Back to Google and we decided to try a pet store product "guaranteed" to work. Bottle number one ran out before we could get rid of the smell. Half of bottle number two and we were ready to try again. UGH! It stunk up the bedroom... AGAIN! Bottle number two proved to be ineffective when we realized that the spray was inside the moulded plastic sides. We had to give up, though not sure what to do with the bed, we left it on the deck until we could come up with a solution. Our lovely landlady came up with a solution...

$15 worth of sand later and our littles LOVE IT!

In other news, we were generously offered another toddler bed by another friend and it's being delivered to us on Saturday! Hooray!