The other night we were just settling down for dinner, and the 3-year-old sat in his chair, looking at us all, waiting for his turn to speak.
It’s not often that the 3-year-old twins are given a chance to speak in our house, because there are a lot of people talking all the time—about school and Minecraft and Pokémon cards—but this time we could clearly see that he had something important to say, so we let him. And what he had to say was as profound and wonderful as you’d expect from a 3-year-old:
“I’m going to toot on the table,” he said and then giggled.
Okay. So it wasn’t at all profound and wonderful. But it did shed some light on circulating smells that were more potent than the actual salmon sprinkled with lemon on the table before us. It’s not like this is something new, however. Boys bring with them many smells in a typical day.
I live in South Texas. That means that, for ten months out of the year, when boys go play outside, they will most definitely come back in smelling like a wet dog. They don’t notice the smell, of course, because they don’t really know what it means to smell bad. But I notice. I’m in the middle of cooking dinner, and it smells like a sheepdog that waded through a pool of sewage just stepped inside my kitchen. When I turn around, I see that it’s not a sheepdog at all, it’s the 5-year-old coming in for a drink of water before he races right back out into the sauna to sweat some more while flailing on the trampoline.
If we spend a day out on the town, where we walk around the historical streets of our city, visiting the Alamo and the Riverwalk and a local park and admiring all the horses pulling carriages, we will have to roll down the van windows on our way home, because the smell of our boys is much stronger than a horse pasture. The one who should be wearing deodorant doesn’t see much use in it, so add to that horse-pasture smell a distinct and mighty body odor.
“What’s that smell?” they’ll say, and Husband and I will just laugh, because if there’s anything that’s impossible in the world, it’s convincing boys that the smell that makes them wrinkle their noses is actually coming from them.
It’s not just the smells they bring back in from outside, either. It’s also the smells that happen throughout the course of a day. Ask any of them to take off their shoes, and you will pass out cold from the fumes that radiate from their socks. I know, because every laundry day I encounter those smelly socks and I have to wear a gas mask if I don’t want to pass out and leave the fort to my 3-year-old twins.
Take a walk in their room, and you will think you are walking in an animal graveyard that didn’t quite get the bodies buried before they started decomposing. This is likely because boys like to leave their dirty clothes—and especially their damp, dirty socks—under their beds.
Pass by their bathroom and you’d swear you were walking in a sewage dump. That’s because boys hardly ever remember to flush the toilet and just let the yellow mellow into a distinctive and disgusting brown.
And then there’s the massive amount of gas that’s balled up inside their little frames. The volume of it is quite remarkable. It’s not unusual for me to be reading a story and taking a deep and adequate breath so that I can properly mimic a man’s voice, but, instead of breathing in clean air, I get a great big whiff of fart, and my nose hairs burn and the back of my throat closes up and I’m coughing it all out, because the invisible fumes that leaked out someone’s cheeks are not air at all, they’re poison to my lungs. The boys, naturally, are very proud of owning up to the fart, so we always know exactly who it was who let loose that SBD (Silent But Deadly), but when I tell them they need to hold it for another time and place, preferably when I’m nowhere around, their daddy will interject a comment about how it’s really bad for you to hold farts and it could cause all sorts of problems later. To which I’ll respond, “That’s fine, but make your bathroom the gas chamber, not this library. I would like to live.” To which they then reply that it would be impossible to make it to the bathroom before the gas slipped out.
It’s hilariously funny for them to let loose an SBD when we’re in the car with all the windows up and the air conditioning turned on high and suddenly we’re all choking and waving our hands in front of our faces because something crawled up inside someone and died and then crawled back out their fart flappers. They bust out laughing every time one of these farts makes a noise other than what is typical—like “pat” or “pop” or the whine kind, and then they’ll keep trying to do it until they have to run off to the bathroom because they tried a little too hard.
The other night I was coming in to check on my 9-year-old in the bath tub, because it was about time for him to dry off and get out so we could start story time, and I knew he wouldn’t want to miss the chapter book we’re reading. I got to my room, which is where he bathes, since we only have two bathtubs and when you have six kids you have to stagger the bathing, and I could have sworn there was a motorboat in the water. When I poked my head in, he was laughing to himself, and the first thing he said, upon seeing me, was “Do you smell it?” I hightailed it out of there, because not only did I not want to smell it, but it was also my bathroom he was making his mark in. I came back a few minutes later to tell him it was time to get out, for real, and he was passed out in the tub.
Not really. But it probably could have happened if the bathroom door had been closed instead of wide open, because the smell, thankfully, dissipated into my room. I know, because when I pulled back the covers of my bed, there was a great rush of heat that smelled like someone had dissected a bunghole and put the pile of whatever was inside it beneath my covers, especially for me. The smell was trapped in the fibers, I think.
Husband says I’m wrong about that. He says it was actually me.
Well, I don’t like to argue about technicalities. I don’t find it necessary to always be right, like some people do.
The smells that boys bring to a home can be an inconvenience when you have guests coming over to visit, but they’re, right now, easily hidden by the spritz of essential oil and a little strategic positioning of the diffusers. I realize that when they get older, my house will probably smell like a locker room, but we’ve got a little time between now and then. I’m confident that I’ll figure out a solution.
Or maybe I’ll just have to get used to it, because this is life with boys.
This is an excerpt from This Life With Boys, the third book in the Crash Test Parents series. To get access to some all-new, never-before-published humor essays in two hilarious Crash Test Parents guides, visit the Crash Test Parents Reader Library page.
