Dec. 3: Favourite smells

One of my favourite smells is new baby smell. Does this make me sound like a grandma? I hope not. I hope it makes me sound like someone who likes babies. Babies are awesome. Yesterday I talked about how cats are bad. Today I will talk about how babies are good. Hooray for babies and the way babies smell. Newborn baby smell is awesome.


This is a picture of my kid when he was exactly two days old. He is sleeping because he had a hard day of drinking formula and being adorable. (Science has proven that my kid was the most adorable baby in history.) I smelled him about 5,000 times before this picture was taken. I planted my nose on top of his little bald baby head and inhaled. Whammo! New baby smell. I was transported.

Scientists say that the substance that gives off new baby smell is called vernix caseosa, but sometimes scientists are silly heads. There’s no need to come up with a technical name for something that smells awesome. Just call it New Baby Smell.

New Baby Smell is so intoxicating that even Cosmopolitan magazine goes on and on about it. This is strange since mostly all Cosmo writes about is foreplay, fashion, and things you can do to make sure you’re a size zero for the rest of your life (try limiting your diet to one fig per month. Read Cosmo for more stupid tips just like this.)

Besides New Baby Smell, there are other smells I like. They are:
 

- A brand new deck of cards.
- What comes out of a bakery on a hot day.
- Fountain pen ink.
- Roses.
- Rain-covered sidewalks.
- Laundry after it comes out of the dryer (or, better yet, after it’s been drying on a clothesline in front of the ocean.)
-
I happen to know that Ashley agrees with me that B-Man smell is among the best smells in the world. She might even think it’s the very best, the epitome of olfactory delight.
 

I have a lousy sense of smell. Ash can usually pick up scents that I fail to detect. I blame a lifetime of allergies for this. Not being able to smell isn’t that big of a curse. If someone farts, for example, I’m happy not having to know that. Ash always knows. If someone farted in her car three days ago, she will know.
 

I would hate to be a bloodhound. They have about 230 million scent receptors in there noses, 40 time as many as ours. This makes their sense of smell roughly 1,000 times stronger than a human’s. This makes me sad. Ever walk into an outhouse on a hot summer day? Imagine being a dog and having to do that. Yuck!
 

Even so, bloodhounds help police track down bad guys. They can stake out a bad guy from tracks he left 10 days ago. Now that’s a super power indeed.

Here is a picture of my kid looking annoyed because so many people are smelling his head.

He was exactly three days old when this picture was taken. His head smelled so good that we were charging people $5 to smell his head for two seconds. The lineup went all the way around the block. Kiddo started to get annoyed after the 136th person (who happened to be Mr. T) picked him up for a sniff. At that point, we had to respect our kid's wishes and told everyone to go home. We made $680 that night and we spent it on a bottle sanitizer, an iTunes card, a large pepperoni pizza, and a private concert from Liza Minnelli, who sang songs from Cabaret and also did a great cover of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 5: Reminiscing

Image
 So my dad, who turns 78 today, gives me "reminiscing" as a title. This is like handing candy to a baby. Pretty much all I do on this blog is reminisce. I reminisce too much. In fact, it's one of my biggest character flaws. My best friend, God rest his soul, hated it when I insisted on reliving the past all the time. He probably would have welcomed this blog. It gives me an outlet to reminisce so he wouldn't have to put up with me. - My dad, like most dads, likes to reminisce about when his kids were younger (my mom doesn't do that a whole lot.) I do that too but I had the advantage of becoming a parent during the prevalence of social media. My kid had his first picture taken when he was less than five seconds old. Later that day, his first day, he starred in his very own movie, like it or not (I'm sure he was indifferent.) Now, whenever I want to reminisce about my kid going down a waterslide or swimming in the lake or playing in a splash pad or saying "...
Read more

July 20: Joy, happiness of spirit

Image
The late Christian apologist Walter Martin used to point out that God never promised people happiness. He promises them joy in the afterlife but not bliss in this one.  I, for one, am sick of sanctimonious mushy gushy reverends saying things like "God loves you and He can't wait to shower you with blessings so you'll be happy." Yeah, tell that to the Christians who were fed to the lions in the coliseum. - My mom paid me a compliment the other day when she said I am one of the least materialistic people she knows. It threw me for a loop because I've been saving my money for a new car for the past three years (thank you, buggabugga, for wiping out my bank account.) I asked her to explain herself and she reminded me that my cruddy little apartment, which I have called home for nearly two decades, would be anathema to the vast majority of people living in First World Canada. My apartment is tiny. There is no balcony. There is no outdoor pool or view of the city skylin...
Read more

July 1: I know you

Image
Back in 1990, when I was 17-years-old, I took an acting for the camera course at the Calgary Jewish Centre. One of my fellow students was a lady named June. She had grey hair – which she described as "salt and pepper" – and a Mary Poppins kind of British accent. I remembered her mostly because her name was June. I had never met a real-life June before. All the Junes I knew were either fictional or months. So June stuck in my mind. I ran into her a couple years later at the library. She was sitting by the magazine rack and reading one of the latest editions (probably not American Rifleman) and I walked up to her and said hello. She didn't recognize me so I had to remind her and then she remembered me. We chatted for a bit. She said she had auditioned for a couple commercials but nothing came of them, so she stopped pursuing acting for the camera. More than a quarter of a century later, I was at Reid's Stationers in Calgary, where I had just bought a new TSWBI pen and s...
Read more