Indian spice and 10 year olds don't always mix

Fossil Kieran

Well they mix.  But don't always mix very well.  I think Kieran is just not used to spicy foods.  Especially when his diet has lots of bread and mac n'cheese in it.  Mix in some East Indian spicy samosas for dinner and well if it can affect my digestive tract, it'll do something nasty to his green innards.

After Boulderz we went with our neighbours to Buhkarra Grill.  It's an East Indian restaurant in the Bloor West.  We like it.  It's a sit down place, not a buffet.

I suppose the birthday stuff and the Indian food, well mixed.  It's like East meets West.  It woke Kieran up in the middle of the night.  We should have just told him to sit in the tub or on the toilet, or just stay put with a big bowl.  But key was to stay put, which he didn't.  Up and down the stairs.  Looking for comfort.

The end result was a large splotch on our relatively new marble floor in our bathroom.

Splotch On

Tresa and I cleaned it up, and it looked ok, but then we noticed after it dried that you could clearly see the vomit impact outline.  There was even this outline of Kieran's foot beside the toilet.

The marble was clearly etched.
Marble is porous.  And what happens when anything acidic comes in contact with it, is the acid makes it's way into the pores and reacts to the calcium in the marble and the result are etch marks.  It basically looks dull.  But you can see the outline of where the acid was.

Splotch OFF!

I was initially upset because I thought the floor was ruined.  And Tresa had mentioned a marble sealer, which would have helped prevent this.  But to what extent? I don't know.  Maybe, maybe not. I was glad he didn't do it on the new flooring on the main floor that I just finished installing.  That would have upset me more.  All that work to be undone in one fell puke.

But after sleeping on it, I thought about it.  Marble is a soft natural stone.  There must be a way to buff it out.  And sure enough I found many articles that show how to restore marble to it's original polished look.  There's a video from some place in Italy demonstrating the restoration of marble etched with muriatic acid.  The last stage is a powder polishing compound.   I had found my solution.
Now finding that solution somewhere in retail was the challenge.

I even asked a marble fabricator and he said that I should have sealed it.  Thanks Captain Obvious.  The other thing he mentioned was that I needed to have it professionally restored.  Sanded, then polished.
I was thinking c'mon.  It's not that bad.
In any case.  Home Depot, well they have nothing that would suit my needs, and the flooring guys I spoke told me that.  BUT, they did put me in touch with a place that supplies all the stone mason, tiler guys.  And guess what.  They had this marble polishing powder product from Tenax, it's about $30 for a 1kg tub.  It's a fine yellowish powder that looks like super fine silica sand.
You can see the faint outline of the splotch in the first photo.  Then I used the powder to polish out a few tiles and you can clearly see that the etch is gone!

Shiny again!

So I went to work on the rest of floor.  Leaving only the outline of Kieran's foot print.  Because I thought it was so neat.   It may eventually fade as the marble loses it's shine from use. But he'll only be 10 once and now that instance in time is forever etched in marble.

This just goes to show that you should not let someone tell you that you that you can't do it yourself.
You can.  There's always a way.  You just have to do some research, find all the options and pick the one that best suits your situation.