Most parents wouldn’t consider cleaning a puke-covered car seat to be one of the best memories of raising children … but it’s certainly one that’s unforgettable.

TODAY anchor Dylan Dreyer posted a selfie on Instagram on Dec. 5. In the image, she is crouching next to a carseat with all of the soft covering removed.

Parents, you know what that means.

Dylan added this caption: “Car seats should come with a puke-proof cover of some kind. Something easy to clean because inevitably every child will vomit all over every nook and cranny of this thing. It’s impossibly disgusting to take apart to clean and painstakingly difficult to put back together.”

Amen, Dylan. You’re preaching to the choir.

I will admit that I have cleaned pukey car seats in a wide variety of scenarios: at our house, in a friend’s driveway, at the vacation house of an acquaintance we hoped to become better friends with, outside of a Walgreens on a 90-degree day, at a rest stop and in the parking lot of a not-quite-open business center in the wee hours of the morning. (We abandoned a beloved Minnie Mouse stuffie in that parking lot. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

You can tell from the comments that many, many parents have been there as well. And they all had advice:

“Remove all the soft seating etc., and use a power washer on a soft cycle, or take it to a self-serve carwash. That was the way to get everything cleaned off.”
“Sprinkle the puke with baking soda & let it dry, much easier to pick up that way.”
“Take a video of yourself taking it apart to reference when putting back together. 😅”
“I discovered bags with plastic rims around them like used in hospitals and our messes have been much smaller since. 😂”
“Car seats are the new printers. Should just throw it away and start over.”

As with everything in parenting, you take the good with the bad. One day, you see your three adorable boys smiling at you in the cutest Christmas card ever. And the next day, you’re elbows deep in the bowels of a car seat and that smell — you know that smell — will never leave your nostrils.

One parent really hit the nail on the head with this response to Dylan’s post: “This is the one thing that has not changed in 40 years! Been there.”