I refuse to throw up my hands in defeat

As a parent, there are few things as "rewarding" as cleaning up your child's vomit in the middle of the night. Especially when there's partially digested milk involved. Imagine the rewards of doing it three times in the span of four hours.

Without taking clothing into consideration, version one was easy: dining room table, wooden chair, concrete floor. No sweat. The third wasn't terrible (graham crackers and water on a pretty resilient rug). The middle one? That was the winner of the night. Curdled milk was all over the overstuffed rocking chair in my daughter's room, down the side, underneath the cushion, in the fabric-covered tote of books beside the chair ... you get the picture.

When I saw the destruction the chair alone endured, I was sure it would be so nasty that we'd have to go all "Velveteen Rabbit" and toss it in the burn pile. But I wasn't going down without a fight. After searching online, I found that we had a "miracle cleaner" right in our cupboard: Arm & Hammer baking soda.

Now I've heard about all the wonderful things baking soda is supposed to do, but being a natural skeptic, I've viewed those claims as I would a huckster hawking a cure-all tonic. So not feeling too confident it would work, I decided to try it. So after wiping off and sopping up as much of the vomit as possible, I sprinkled baking soda liberally on the damp spot. This morning, I vacuumed it off to find that the chair doesn't stink. So it gets to stay, after all.

And the best thing is that I didn't have to endure the stench of that industrial-strength cleaner powder they use in schools and (unfortunately) on trans-Atlantic flights. To me, that smell is worse than the vomit itself.

However, I haven't - and don't intend to - test Arm & Hammer's efficacy against scarlet fever.

(Photo courtesy of Real Simple)