Dear Mordechai,

My boys killed my couches. What should I do? Should I replace them?

Yes, definitely. Maybe replace them with girls. They don’t ruin couches as much.

Oh, wait. It just occurred to me that you mean the couches. Don’t do that. At least until you replace the kids.

My wife and I have this issue too. We have microfiber couches, which we originally bought because the salespeople told us it was easy to scrub spills off of. But they didn’t demonstrate that in the store. And anyway, it’s not really spills that I’m worried about. I’m more worried about my kids using it as a napkin. Or a trampoline. Or a parkour element.

Another major selling point on these couches, for us, was that the cushions don’t come off. Our previous couch had never once had the cushions on. But having cushions that don’t come off isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, because when someone spills, we can’t flip the cushion. And this is pretty bad, because we didn’t stop and think that the only other things we have in the house that are made of microfiber are mops and towels and glasses-cleaning cloths, and the reason they’re made out of microfiber is—get this—it’s proven to absorb dirt.

So now we have two huge microfiber hunks in our living room, picking up every bit of shoe dirt. Sure, we tell our kids to keep their feet off the couch, but they have no memory from one time to the next.

“Take your shoes off the couch!”

“They’re not on the couch.”

“They were.”

“When?”

“When I started yelling. Oh my goodness, get them off the couch!”

“Again?”

So at some point, there was so much dirt on the couch that the fabric felt like leather. So I looked it up, and it turns out that the best thing to use on these couches is rubbing alcohol. Just spray some rubbing alcohol onto a cloth and scrub a given spot on the couch using small, circular motions for like 10 solid minutes, then repeat as necessary until the couch is covered in several small circles that are various different shades of whatever color it was when you bought it, you’re keeling over from the alcohol fumes and the rag you’re using is black. This tends to happen before you even finish the first cushion. You need a whole pile of cleaning cloths.

It kind of reminds me of the book, “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back,” where two kids let a seven-foot cat into their lives for a second time in as many books, and they find that he once again makes a mess—this time it’s a bathtub stain—and that everything he uses to clean the stain gets dirty. It’s also revealed in that book that the cat has 26 progressively smaller cats living in his hat, and he didn’t know when he came to the narrator’s house that he’d make a stain, which means they must have been in his hat for the entire first book as well, waiting for their moment. I think this is why my wife doesn’t let cats into our house.

And then, just recently, my 7-year-old threw up on the couch.

Well, not just on the couch. In middle he realized what he was doing, so he leaned over and threw up on the carpet. So that’s great—the two cloth surfaces in our house that don’t fit in the washing machine.

The throw-up was not Purim-related. We don’t actually know why it happened, but were relieved when it did, because he’d been complaining about stomach pains all day, and my wife had been worried that it was appendicitis.

So the first thing my wife did, after she wiped it off, was spray the whole area with rubbing alcohol. Because alcohol cleans microfiber couches, right? But she did it to get rid of the smell. Like that’s a known thing from Purim—nothing gets rid of the smell of throw up like alcohol.

“Hey, this guy smells like throw up! Give him some more alcohol!”

So now it’s a weird combination of the two. It smells like the couch threw up.

So my wife looked it up, and she found an article that said we should spray it with vinegar, because vinegar is supposed to get rid of smells, although I don’t actually believe it. I think it just overpowers the smells so that they now smell like vinegar. I’ve never spilled an entire jar of pickles on the floor and said, “Mm! Smells like nothing!”

So we sprayed on vinegar, and the whole house smelled like a weird combination of vinegar and alcohol and throw up, which was even worse. Sometimes we thought the smell went away, but that was just because we were used to it, which is a disgusting thought. It’s the people who come into the house who are going to smell it, and we won’t know. So we had to keep walking out of the house and coming back in and sniffing.

But it turned out that the vinegar wasn’t doing it. So then I put on baking soda, and the couch exploded.

Okay, it didn’t. But the cushion kind of hardened. And it still didn’t really smell better if you put your nose to it, except that you’d get a white spot on your nose, plus that cushion was significantly lighter than the others from all the scrubbing, so we had to scrub the whole rest of the couch to make it cleaner. And then the other couch.

We were in a mad rush to do this, because we were having guests that Shabbos, and we were afraid that the guests wouldn’t want to sit on that part of the couch. But it turns out that they specifically sat on that cushion, probably because it looked the cleanest. And when they left, the couch didn’t smell anymore! So I think we transferred our “Cat in the Hat” situation to them.

At least they can shower.

By Mordechai Schmutter

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].