There's something your kids use every day that's probably dirtier than your toilet.

By HOLLY WAINWRIGHT.

Confession time.

There’s something that my youngest child uses every single day that I have washed twice in four years.

Something that, according to scientists who know such things, is likely to house twice as many germs as you’ll find on a toilet seat.

I’m talking about my son’s car seat.

A study from Birmingham University about my disgusting hygiene standards typical household germs recently discovered that the the average car seat houses 100 potentially dangerous bacteria PER SQUARE CENTIMETRE.

Another study, conducted in the US, found that out of 20 car seats tested, two tested positive for E.Coli and one for Staph. Neither of which are things you want hitchhiking on the school run.

I’m trying hard not to feel like these scientists are out to get me, because it’s been a tough week, but this news is not in the least bit surprising.

Because my son’s car seat is gross.

My boy only likes to eat his morning meal in the car. It doesn’t matter how long that piece of toast has been sitting on his plate at the breakfast table, he will not take a bite until it’s time to leave the house. And then he will eat the squishy bits of the toast in his carseat and stash the crusts wherever he feels like it. Most likely down the side of his seat.

And then there are all those colds that this winter has brought to our blessed family home. His nose has been running like a tap for three months now.

And then there was that time that everything went really quiet in the backseat and I turned around to see that he had got his hands one of those squeezy fruit pouches and was quietly working it into all the crevasses of his Safe N Sound..

Or that time I gave him a banana on the way home from swimming. Who even DOES that?

And then let’s pause to remember that before my son got his sticky paws on that carseat, his sister had already been annointing it with crap for two years. The only time it’s been cleaned is after two particularly unpleasant vomiting incidents (we’re not animals, people).

Oh my God, my car seat is going to KILL MY CHILDREN.

The science-shaming from the boffins of Birmingham worked. I got up this morning and Googled ‘How to clean my baby car seat’ – and was so exhausted by the wealth of advice on the matter that I decided that this was a job best left to someone else, and promptly sent the links to my partner.

But one thing that I did learn is that the trick to not feeling entirely defeated by the idea of removing and reinstalling your car-seat to clean it is apparently taking lots of pictures of it on your phone, so you know where all the buckles and straps go.

So I went to the car to take pictures, and found THIS:

I’m hoping that before the long weekend is out, my boy’s feral car seat is going to go from a crummy calamity to THIS: