Classic quotes, Vol. 41

Here are a few more recent quotes from my 8-year-old son D-, my 5-year-old daughter M-, and my nearly-2-year-old son E-:

D- (having been shown an "I'm too busy to be organized!" mug I'd gotten for my wife J-): Hey! Mom should put that on her desk! ...Because she's always so busy... that she can't be... organized.

E- (coming into his family heritage, waking unwillingly as I laid him down to change him one morning): Eyes! (rolling away, pawing at his face) Wight! (openly frustrated that I just don't seem to get it) Bwight!!

D- (seeing an Adidas footprint in the dirt): Hey look! It says AIDS in the footprint!

M- (vehemently disputing D-'s account of her assault): I didn't punch him in the EYE... I punched him in the FOREhead!!

D- (referring to a man speaking through a megaphone to a crowd of kids): That's not a very loud... shouty-thingy.

Things that amuse me, Vol. 7

Here are some of the happenings and such that have been amusing me lately:

1. Only a baby can sit there crying after punching himself in the face and still reel in the sympathy of the whole room.

2. There's nothing like an earthquake, string of tsunamis, resultant fires, and impending nuclear meltdowns to make a 7-year-old ask me why I don't turn off the music and turn on the news on the way to school.

3. I recently wiped out several dozen flies flirting and sunning themselves on the east side of my house. They died as they lived-- trying to make thousands of babies and irritating the hell out of me.

4. A baby is the kind of person whom you can't trust to not urinate on you during any given 1-minute period of the day.

5. Unlike his do-gooder cousin the Easter Bunny, the equally famous After-Easter Bunny has this week been employing his Magical Rabbit powers of whisking himself around to the baskets of all good little boys and girls of the world to remove just enough candy each time that they'll never notice.

Amusing searches, Vol. 11

Here are more of the most amusing searches that have brought people here, offering me yet another opportunity to employ my superpowers of Mockery and Sarcasm.

(All search strings are reprinted exactly as they were entered, and the search text links to the post at which the visitor arrived.)

• escort woman says "you look handsome" (Cumberland, RI) - Escort woman then says, "I have to charge you extra for compliments." Sorry, champ.

• reasons a 3 year old might not talk (Cambridge, OH) - Well, to make light of your understandably vexing problem, now that I'm on my second 3-year-old, I gotta say I haven't come upon a single reliable reason so far. Even unconsciousness.

Still hoping one will come along, though, for at least a few minutes at a time.

• homosexual sons of stay at home fathers (Plymouth, MA) - You do know I was kidding, right?

• pinworm potty (Kuching, Malaysia) - Boy, that really makes me just wanna hold it forever.

• things that I don't like doing (Mumbai, India) - I came up in this search of yours??   .....frowny face.

• what is the worst smelling diaper (Knoxville, IL) - That's kind of a philosophical question, so I'll give you a philosophical answer: the one you're changing right now. (Closely followed by that one you changed a couple days ago, wherever it may now be rotting.)

A conversation with M-: The wipe that shakes the barley

This is the epitome of a conversation I have with M- at least once every day, proving she's definitely my kid:

Me: Hey, are you stinky?

M- (shiftily): No.

Me: I beg to differ. (as supportively as I can muster) Okay, we have to change your diaper now. (while beginning to change her) You have to tell somebody when you have to go to the bathroom, rememb...

M- (eagerly, in a Notifying Tone): I have to go to the bathroom!

Me: Yes, I know you did, that's why I'm here changing you-- you have to tell somebody BEFORE you go in your pants, so we can help you get to the toilet. And if you go in your pants by accident, you need to tell somebody that, too, so we can help get you cleaned up, right?

M- (same tone as above): I made poop in my diaper!

Me (with one final wipe): Yes. Just like that. Thanks.

---

You may also enjoy the other (4 YO son) D- conversations, (2YO daughter) M- conversations, and (wife) J- conversations.

Confessions, Vol. 1

1. If only they made giant diapers that still fit snugly on a toddler, I would gladly slap one of those on M- each night and sleep like a med student through the morning, while she fed and entertained herself with the many things I'd generously leave in her crib.

2. I referred to a cartoon chipmunk in a children's television show as "kind of an a**hole" with as much forethought and seriousness as I would the friend of a friend.

3. It's hard to write amusing "confessions" after somberly reading through PostSecret for more than an hour.

4. I find it oddly freeing to stop this list at four items on a day such as this, the fifth day of the week and month.*

---

* And yet, look at the time stamp.

Hey buddy, can I get a spot?

Don't get me wrong: I fully appreciate that as a freshly 20-month-old baby-o, M- is handling the toilet training process way ahead of her time. On paper, that is.

But my new rule is, if you're old enough to say, "Oh, thanks" like a full-grown man having his basketball bounced back over to him when I wipe your backside, you're old enough to start taking care of that business all by your lonesome.

Is that so unreasonable?

10 ways work differs from home

After spending last week working outside my home for the first time in over a year (I most recently spent many months working from home before leaving that job last November), it's only natural that I was bombarded with observations on the differences from my now-typical work week.

Here's a quick list of 10 differences between being paid to work in an office and being unpaid to stay at home with small children:

1. Generally speaking, you must wear shoes the entire day.

2. Unless you happen to be The Boss, you are officially not considered the wisest and most experienced person on the premises.*

3. It's pretty quiet, to the point that you have to repeatedly disabuse yourself of the notion that everyone around you must be up to something truly naughty.

4. Unless you work at the Matchbox Car Testing Facility, you don't get to play with toy cars all afternoon.

5. When people start getting fussy, you can't make them lay down and take a nap.

6. Unless you work as some kind of nurse, you can go eight whole hours without having to help anyone vacate their bladder or bowels, and you don't even have to be ready to clean up if they have trouble trying to do it all by themselves.

7. You can swear, at least once in awhile.

8. You get to eat all of your own food. Not only that, but you can do so without feeling like just maybe you need to be planning a method to dispose of the corpse of what will appear to an outsider to be an emaciated street urchin.

9. The kids might actually be interested in seeing pictures of your co-workers.

10. Unless you really, really need to start checking out the classifieds in earnest, whenever anyone hits you in the balls, they will apologize without any prompting at all.


* Parents of teenagers may have resigned themselves to a conflict of opinions on this particular issue.

Household occurrences likely to revisit me in nightmares

Here are several events at our house, most from this morning alone, that I believe I'll be seeing replayed in some form in the coming nights whenever I manage some sleep:

1. M- firmly poking the bottom of an open box of cereal on the table and me lunging forward to catch it just before it turned upside down. I haven't always been so lucky. (In my nightmares, I'm sure the box will always be just out of my reach.)

2. D- standing on the rug between the dining room and kitchen saying, "I'm having an accident!"

3. M- streaking through the dining room with a Spider-Man fork stolen from the dishwasher.

4. M- climbing all over me like a boa constrictor, onto and off of the chair, moaning, "No, no, no, noooooo!" over and over again for no apparent reason other than sniffles and crankiness (it was before 8).

5. D- holding a ball and taking aim at my happy place while I demonstrate how to stand upon the parallel bars at the park. (Luckily it was only a Nerf ball so it didn't hurt, but still I saw the look in his eye-- it was a vicious one expectant of painful hilarity.)

6. M- taunting D- by walking across the family room with his Corduroy bear and, instead of giving it back as originally ordered, slapping him twice across the face with it (like Monty Python's Fish Slapping Dance) and running back away.

7. Driving off a giant mushroom and falling into a bottomless pit, like I did a couple times last night in MarioKart Wii. (In my nightmares, I'm sure the magic man on the cloud will never come to save me.)

8. M- splashing her hands in the toilet saying, "Pee-pee, pee-PEEEE!" (we've gotten thisclose to it several times now), before bidding it bye-bye while waving as she has been doing for the past few weeks.

9. Closing a fresh, clean diaper, standing up and turning around, and then detecting a dreadful hint of baby byproducts. Yes, M- tends to be picky where she defecates, but then so do some adults.

10. A massacre by a rampaging spoon-spork hybrid. Okay, I only read about it, but I have a very impressionable brain, and things like that tend to stick. At least it's better than a velociraptor attack.

Things that should revisit me in my dreams:

1. M- comforting a crying D- by saying, "eye-ing", offering a kiss and hug, and then sitting down to let him read her the book (Good Night, Maine) they had been fighting over earlier.

Feeling her oats

Let me begin with the bright side: I have a great story for M-'s prom date.

I do forewarn you, this story is not for those who enjoy a nice warm cappuccino or bowl of applesauce as a mid-morning treat.

This morning, M- developed a pretty bad case of diarrhea. After hearing the horrible, though familiar, herald of a long day of diaper cream and Pedialyte and looking down to see her squatting on the kitchen floor, I decided to grab hold of the silver lining and hang on for dear life. I pointed out to her that she just (picture a really gentle, happy, and encouraging voice, smiling to mask the pain in my nose) "made poop in [her] diaper!"

For those of you without children, this helps build her awareness of her bodily functions and prepare her for the upcoming process of learning to leave Daddy alone and take care of such things all by herself.

Being the fast learner that she is (see this post on her vocabulary), I think she's already got it down pat. For diapers 3 through 5, she paused in her wanderings about the house, tooted her own horn, and said very happily, "Poot. Poot!!" Then she laughed a lot.

This is probably partially due to her consistent pleasure at knowing things and communicating them, but I think it's mostly due to her genes gently informing her that bodily functions are as hilarious as they are useful. I wish I could argue with her, as much as I wish the torture would end.

Baby Hulk smash!

As I'm sure I've made clear, D- loves his sister to pieces. He frequently hugs and kisses her out of nowhere, though lately there's been a suspicious rise in his calling it to our attention, possibly to store up a bank of good-boy credit. More likely, I think he's drunk on the praise he gets when he's nice to her. He'll hug her and say, "Daddy... Daddy, look at us! I'm hugging her-- we're nice! We're so cute!"

However, he does use up some of his good-boy credit occasionally, such as the other day when he decided he wanted a break from the baby and took some books onto his bed. Naturally, M- followed him and started calling out, "Up, peez... up, peeeeez!" and trying to climb up onto the bed. Once she got most of the way up, he pushed her off. I imagine the look of fear and betrayal on her face was akin to the lady falling to her death in the movie Cliffhanger.

He also has less-shocking ways of tempering his overall worship of his sister. For example, last week, after building an elaborate Lincoln Log cabin in the middle of the floor (against my advice) at 10:30 in the morning on a weekday, he heard M- calling from her crib after naptime. His response, as opposed to his usual, "Her's awake... you wanna go get her? Can I go see her?", was, "Don't get her until Momma gets home. Okay?"

To clarify, he was willing to have his sister sit locked in a jail cell for 5 hours, missing meals and overflowing her diaper, just to protect his poorly-planned and totally unfortified toy house from her destructive impulses, which, in her defense, are just as finely-tuned as his.

Now that's love.

Thar's GOLD in thut thar water!

Let me begin by stating for the record that M- has a problem confusing her tub seat with the toilet (which she has yet to begin using, ahem... so much for her being extremely advanced). For more information, see item #6 in my 10 reasons my 3-year-old son may NOT be homosexual post, and also possibly another post I can't remember and am too lazy to find.

Suffice to say, that post would mention that she opens (at the very least) each bath and shower by wetting herself, whether or not she just took off a fully loaded diaper. As yet another side note, this surprises D- every single time, judging by his tone as he calls out, "Her peed!!"

Anyway, the other day M- was apparently overcome with thirst only once I started getting her clothes off for shower time, because she had just turned down a cup of milk not 5 minutes earlier. I'll stop here for a moment in case you're considering stopping here yourself, and let me reassure you it doesn't get as bad as it sounds it might.

She sat in her tub seat (as a $1 thrift-store find of Katie's, it's in a lower weight class of the same league as my dishwasher), lunging towards the falling water with a bath-toy cup, desperately trying to catch a few drops of that precious first water out of the shower, which as we all know is generally of a temperature just slightly warmer than Absolute Zero.

After middling success in this endeavor, she noticed a much more appealing alternative: the alluring golden mead that had started pooling in her seat. Now, this is a kid who loves new and exotic things as well as watered-down juice, so I think she saw in this a Venn Diagram of ecstasy. She pointed and pulled out most of her beverage-based repertoire, calling, "Joo! Joooo! (juice) Tir-tee! (thirsty) 'Wink! 'Wink! (drink)" as she tried to think of a way to get this newest flavor of Kool-Aid into her mouth.

Suddenly, Daddy found much more success than M- had in getting that shower water down to the baby, and just like that, the magic elixir of the gods vanished as quickly as it came. Much like leprechauns do. Maybe they brought it? The world may never know.

10 unanswerable questions

Here are 10 questions whose answers will likely elude us all in this lifetime:

1. Why is it when a toddler spasms awkwardly in the presence of music, it's considered cute, but when I do it, I'm told I shouldn't ever dance again?

2. Why are the little rafters over our porch considered the coolest place in town for birds to hang out (based on the number of white spots, to put it delicately, that accrue right outside our door each day), when there are millions of alternatives just within a block or so? I can't help but feel personally targeted.

3. Why does my daughter wake up before 8:00 in the morning just to whine and fall apart before nap time about an hour later? I know I'd whine a lot less right back at her if I could get that extra hour of sleep.

4. Why did my landlord build an office in the basement (which does flood a bit, occasionally) and then later decide to rent it out as an apartment to a lady who has something weird about her that I can't put my finger on? It's like having a troll secretly living under the building, a troll who doesn't have a mailbox or any other standard amenities.

5. Why does my daughter insist on doing everything by herself, her own way, except simple little things that she's actually capable of doing herself? And why does she always want us to do and undo each of those things over and over and over again for 15 minutes straight?

6. Why is it I spend my whole day exhausted and praying for bed, but when bed time comes, I'm wide awake and only thinking of all the things I now have the freedom to do? For example, last night J- went to bed at 8:30 (extra tired and having to get up at 5am as usual), while I stayed up till 11 watching the Daily Show/Colbert Report and Conan (both in double-speed on the DVR), and then playing Tanks and Shooting Gallery on Wii Play.

7. Why does my son feel compelled to ask me questions to which he knows the answer and then get indignant when I give him joke answers instead?

8. Why is it that when kids' tummies stick out a little, it's cute, but when mine sticks out a little, I need to lay off the pizza?

9. Why is a clean, fresh diaper the only diaper into which it's acceptable to vacate one's bowels? And furthermore, once one has done that, why does one insist on acting oblivious to this fact while hanging around me like iron filings on an electromagnet?

10. Why did I feel an inexorable pull to round this list out to ten items? I know there are many, many more questions I could add, but I also knew how hard it would be to think of enough of them in time to publish this and get off the computer before noon. The answer has something to do with obsessions and compulsions, but as to why they are my slave masters, the world may never know.

Things I found in my bed last night

Maybe I should stop leaving our bedroom door open during the day-- here is a list of:

Things I found in my bed last night

1. Extremely disheveled sheets and blankets.

2. A toy car.

3. A pre-worn 3-to-9-month-sized onesie (what can I say, the baby-o's on the small side) that I had put in the hamper.

4. An oversized rubber Winnie the Pooh ball.

5. Some of my wife's freshly-laundered (a week ago now, actually...) clothes she has yet to put away (what with the wedding shower planning and now her trip to speak at Katie's school).

6. A pencil.

7. A little book shaped like Tigger's face.

8. A (clean) size 3 diaper.

9. A half-full sippy cup.

And then, to contrast that list with my pre-marriage-and-children days, here are the:

Things I used to find in my bed

1. (See number one in the list above.)

2. Myself sleeping, more than just occasionally.

I like me a self-serve baby

As M- gets older, I'm taken back to the glorious days before I was able to take for granted how many things D- could do for himself. Each day I was amazed by some new thing he mastered. You see, as a parent, and as a human, my goal in all areas is to be as lazy as legally allowed, and this stretch of self-sufficiency for the kiddos is a big part of that effort.

Of course, I will never take for granted that D- can use the toilet completely by himself (and it is absolutely still the high point of this cycle), but all the other little things just kind of fade into distant memories as you take on new challenges. You can never be fully prepared for all the little things you have to do for a baby (including pre-chewing their food, for some-- thankfully that's not so common in this country...), and when you're hit with all of them at once, they just kind of blur together. Once the kid grows up, those little things all disappear together and you get spoiled. This is how people end up with more than one child.

Granted, that helpless baby phase does not end all at once, but in some children, it certainly seems to. For example, as I discussed yesterday, M- has suddenly burst forward in her speaking abilities, and she seems in it to win it. Similarly, back in December, before she was 1, she just began walking outright all of a sudden after a select few test steps in the week or so before that. There was no middle ground, no real learning phase. And around the same time, she popped out one, two, four, then six teeth total, all in the span of a week or two.

I really can't fully describe all the things she can do and understand versus a month ago, but I think I can pretty much sum it up in one anecdote:

Through much of her first year, M- had to be held while sleeping, or she would wake up and scream, and almost literally never sleep. This was not for lack of trying on J-'s and my part-- I think you all must realize by now that I can be a "terrible father" with the best of them. I mean, God made earplugs for a few reasons, and one of those was to show your children you really, really aren't listening and they just have to deal with whatever they're screaming about.

Now, M-'s a cosmopolitan baby that will sleep anywhere you lay her down (at the right time, of course) and when she wakes up, she merely calls patiently for her entertainment committee (D-) to dance a jig in front of her crib till Daddy comes to get her. But what's more, now that she has harnessed the power of speech, at exactly 10:40 this morning, she put down her toy, looked up at me, and said "nigh-nighhhhh" several times until I picked her up and confirmed the message was received. Nap 1 went down like clockwork, then she did the same thing again about 2 hours later.

"And I think to myself, what a wonderful world."

Developments at our house, Vol. 1

Some developments at our house in the past day or so:

1. Last night, I offered M- a bottle of milk since she was trying to steal D-'s cup. She looked frustrated as she took a step back, shook her head, and then surprised herself by saying "No" in a very thoughtful way. Against my better judgment and future sanity with regards to this particular word, I praised her for speaking her mind.

This goes along with her saying "mo' " several times recently when signing for more, the dozen other words we got her to say later on last night (including "yeah", "car", "kitty", "shiny", "hurt", "sorry", [see #7 below]"dude", and "poopy"), and the ones she has been saying for awhile now (such as "daddy", "momma", the names of most of my family, "hi", "bye-bye", "doggy", "guy", "go", "wow", "uh-oh", and "nigh'-nigh' "). Unsurprisingly, I cannot get her to say any of these this morning.

2. D- has inexplicably taken to speaking in a 3-year-old's approximation of a southern accent. I would place it somewhere around Imaginary Tennessee.

3. Just as J- was finishing up changing M-'s diaper, M- suddenly flipped over, stood up, grabbed the old diaper, and ran across the room while shaking it vigorously. Was there Number 2? Oh yes, of course there was.

I never thought I'd say it, but thank god for constipation...

4. D- has decided that wearing camouflage pajamas requires him to repeatedly march with a mean face towards the TV, point at his reflection, shoot himself with screwdriver, and then fall down dead. I'm not sure where he learned this, but he may soon be joined by 20,000 more 3-year-olds seeking to put a stop to this menacing force.

5. M- discovered that tossing an aptly-named throw pillow on the floor provides her with a portable and comfy seat from which her feet only just touch the floor (if you can believe it). She also found out the painful way that on such an uneven surface, bouncing on one's bottom out of sheer joy at this discovery will cause one's head to hit the floor surprisingly hard almost as many times as one tries it.

6. I learned that a 1-year-old will actually struggle to find her brother hiding under a blanket right where he was sitting for the past half an hour, even when said brother is giggling uncontrollably. (She eventually found him, but only after walking around for several minutes calling him with her hands turned up in a "Where on Earth did he go?!" posture.)

7. J- learned that you never tell a baby she can't have the phone back immediately after hanging up on her aunt, because that baby will be bound by Baby Law to shriek once loudly and then head butt you in the mouth at full force.

Note: Here are the other volumes.

Diapering as a spectator sport

Lately, D- has taken an increasingly proprietary attitude towards M-, not meaning that he wants to set clear divisions of who owns what (at least not that much) but rather that he seems to believe that he owns her, or at least as much as J- and I do.

At the same time, he also has more than a passing interest in bodily functions, which is to be expected, but this results in a sometimes-awful combination when it comes to diaper-changing time, (along with other times, of course). He thoroughly enjoys using his developing vocabulary to expound upon the properties of M-'s output.

Here's what went on Friday after J- got home and discovered a less-than-immaculate baby:

J-: (laying M- down and handing her a bear she wanted, before depantsing her and employing the standard baby-talk voice) Now, you be a good baby and play with that bear! I'm gonna change your poopy little diaper!

D-: (superhumanly eager, akin to the old Shake n' Bake girl) And I'm gonna watch!!

J-: (finding the eagerness disconcerting, she makes an executive decision) No... no you're not.

D-: Why not?

J-: Cause M- needs some privacy, like when you go to the bathroom.

She then began to change M-, and she immediately noticed D- "casually" walking by the couch and peeking around her back to estimate the relative impressiveness of M-'s byproducts.

J-: D-, get away! I told you to give M- some privacy!

D-: I'm just walkin' around!!

J-: Go walk to the other room!

Once she was done, J- let D- know he could come back, but he very clearly was pretending not to hear her before saying "What?"

She asked, "Don't you want to come back in the room?" and he very dryly answered that no, he did not want to come back right now, as if there was no reason for us to assume he would ever want to be in that room during his work day.

I just can't wait till toilet training, round two.

Going out to eat

Do you know what doesn't make a good piece of note paper, even when struck by an idea in the middle of the night? A diaper.

As best I could tell after trying to trace my intended chicken scratchings the next morning, I think I wanted to write an entry about something that happened to us the other day at the library.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, M- seems to be trying her best to double her weight each day. She took this to an extreme when we were at the library last week, waiting for D- to be finished with his storytime. M- was very cutely sitting at a little computer to play a Dora game some kid had abandoned. I only wish I had a picture of this... maybe I'll remember to bring my camera next time we go and I can stage a picture. Anyway, after a few minutes of happily clicking and smacking away, she noticed a lady near us was feeding her son some leftovers.

M- then did what she always does when food is within her gravitational range-- she began loudly smacking her lips and saying "Mmmmmm!" Little did she know (or did she?), this lady was a classic Mediterranean mother, and she immediately decided that based on M-'s antics, I must be a single father who, out of sheer ignorance, limited M- to one meal a day, and she would soon die without some substantial home cooking from someone who knows what she's doing.

After being prompted to fetch a spoon from M-'s diaper bag, over the next 10 minutes, we moved from a few dainty spoonfuls (of what I was told was "cooked rice, beans, and... sheep meat?") to a constant flow from this lady's dish to M-'s mouth. I had no way of knowing, at the time, the limit of this lady's generosity, seeing as she had been trying to feed this food to her son (who was maybe 6 years old and totally uninterested in cold leftovers), so I foolishly kept assuming each spoonful was the last. This made for a long, awkward 15 minutes or so.

Finally, I suggested we should get going since D- would be done shortly, so she suggested I needed to manifest a Tupperware container to take some food home with me, since "she so hungry" and "she need good food to make her strong like [unintelligible]." I ended up dumping the corn flakes out of M-'s Snack Trap cup and into a very narrow empty bottle (easier said than done), so she could pack it full of this food, which I will say was quite good.

The lady was so nice, though aggressive in that Greek/Italian way I know well enough to not be offended by, that it only occurred to me after my daughter had ingested roughly a lamb shank's worth of this stuff that it might not be a good idea to take ambiguous food from strangers. For all I know, this lady and her son had spent their lives building up an immunity to iocaine powder, all so they could lure wandering morons into ingesting it so they could rob them and pose their bodies in ridiculous positions for their own amusement. Or something like that.

Anyway, both D- and I later managed to wrest some away from M- at lunchtime that day so we could try it too, and none of us have died yet. Now, obviously that lady had no way of knowing that M- frequently subsists on various bits of cereal when Daddy's in charge, but I can't help feeling that M- somehow traitorously communicated this fact to her. Furthermore, having gotten such an exotic treat in the middle of the afternoon, I think I see M- dying inside just a little bit each time I drop a bit of bread (or whatever other boring food I happen to have on hand) into her mouth when she's desperately tugging at my pant leg in the kitchen.

Now that I think I'm moving past the rejection, it might actually work for me to let M- outsource her feeding to the diverse international community that is our neighborhood. She could be a food snob by kindergarten! And I could be even lazier until then!

I've got to go rip some holes in that baby's pants.

Now that's home cooking

This morning, I thought that M- had created something unholy in her diaper, as she is wont to do. It was something I hadn't smelled before, though, so I was confused, since we hadn't fed her anything unusual the previous day. And the random things she eats off the floor (we're not the best housekeepers) don't usually add up to enough to affect herrrrrrrrr... output. By the way, yes, we do try to stop her from eating off the floor. Except of course when I've put pieces of cereal on the floor in a trail leading her wherever it is I need her to go.

But I digress...

Anyway, upon further review, the smell did not seem to be emanating from the baby's direction. Rather, it seemed to be emanating from the walls, floors, appliances, and my eye sockets.

I had faint, unbidden recollections of the dog food factory we used to live near, which I do understand does not sound all that unpleasant to anyone who has never lived near a dog food factory. Just trust me on this one when I tell you I was quickly looking to find the source of the smell and smother the life out of it.

It slowly dawned on me that it really was seeping through the floor and walls, and pouring in from under the front door, as our downstairs neighbors were "cooking" again. Generally, we are treated to (literally) stomach-turning waves of powerful East Asian spices, which is at least understandable compared to this smell, though in the past the smells have been so powerful we have literally been driven out of our home for an evening or longer. In answer to the inevitable "what on Earth are they cooking?" question, we have received such items as Styrofoam coolers labeled "Frozen Whole Cooked Octopus" amongst their voluminous garbage piled on our shared porch, as well as right next to our THREE ENORMOUS GARBAGE CANS. Sorry about that... sounds like this might be a few separate posts.

Anyway, this smelled nothing like food, and I cannot imagine what it was. But the weirdest part was that this was the morning, so either it was a very elaborate breakfast/brunch (no waffles and cereal for them!), or just the awful-est phase of an even more intricate dinner, because the smell faded by mid-afternoon. The world will never know what it was, of course, because we almost never even see our neighbors, much less speak with them. On a side note, all interactions we have had with the one representative we do see have been appropriately polite and friendly thus far.

Screamingly loud, predictably off-key karaoke sessions at all hours don't count as "interactions", right?