I had one of those Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman moments this morning. Lynn and I were rushing to get ready to go to the birthday party of another two-year-old--just a few weeks younger than Ben--and a tiny can of Coke balanced on a shelf fell to the floor and exploded without any of us hearing it in our temporary pantry. We just had our basement seismically retrofit (retrofittedly seismicized?) and thus we have weird stuff in a corner of the kitchen.
I come into the kitchen while Lynn is playing with Ben and say, Oh, no, whatever has happened? I piece the narrative together--the can slipped off, hit the floor, exploded, covering the floor and adjacent objects with Coke spittle--and then grab our amazing new Hoover FloorMate SpinScrub 800 Floor Cleaner! (Go, Hoover. Go, Hoover. Go, Hoover.)
We just bought this thing a few days ago because our house is full of wood floors and we don't have an upstairs utility sink. It's frustrating to mop, and it's very labor intensive, too. We have a good vacuum cleaner, but with a toddler, we need to mop regularly. The reviews on this particular model were pretty good, and I understood its weaknesses.
It's actually pretty fabulous. It's a dry vac, wet vac, and scrubbing vac. You use a cleaner that's supplied in small quantity, and which Amazon reviewers recommended substituting half the recommended does with vinegar, and thus you're always spraying clean liquid on the floor. Spinning scrubbing brushes break up crud and dirt on the floor, and the wet vac sucks it into an easy-to-clean separate compartment. A separate set of attachments and hose plug into a side panel so you can access hard-to-reach places. There's also a separate set of grout scrubbers (both for the main unit and the hose).
I tackled the Coke explosion (which had no Mentos involved, thankfully), and within about five minutes, the floor was gleaming, cabinets cleaned, and with a little elbow grease, all trace of proprietary high-fructose corn syrup beverage removed. I turned my beatific face to the invisible camera and said, "No more waxy yellow build-up!"