Butt Sniffin'

It's funny how addicted I am to the internet, my email, and recently this little blog o mine. My nighttime lack of internet this past week was very stressful, so in some ways I'm glad I was tired and grumpy from work so I didn't have to pace around the house muttering expletives about my cable company.
Tonight I'll call "stinky alert night." Every hour or so my child, who has quite obviously taken a break from the potty training that we started almost two weeks ago, thought it would be funny to tell us that she had a stinky. We asked her over and over, do you have a stinky? Or do you just have a froggy (which somehow became our family term for passing gas)? She would smile and point to her butt and say, "smell it."
I never ever in a million years thought before I had a child that I would be a butt sniffer. I thought butt sniffing was only for dogs and cats and other wild things with small brains and fur. But I have become a world class butt sniffer, and so has my husband Hal. The other day he walked into the livingroom, having just risen from a weekend afternoon nap, and immediately started sniffing the air around him, his face contorting into a grimace. Oooooh, I smell a stinky. He looks at me. Who me, I can't smell a thing! (I'd been stuffy for weeks - damn allergy to the dog.) And then he asks the question. Sarah, do you have a stinky or did you have a froggy? Sarah shakes her head yes. Then he seperates the questions and asked them again. Stinky? She shakes no. Froggy? Yeah daa-ee. I had a froggy. Then she goes hopping across the carpet. Ribbet, ribbet! So he goes and does it anyway. Grabs her up and sniffs her butt. Looks inside the diaper. Yep, just a froggy Sweetie!

Then there are the farting kittens. Two weeks after I adopted the dog during a minor bout of depression, I saw on a listserv the little orage tabby of my dreams - for adoption. I've always wanted an orange tabby. When we drive 35 miles to the farm, there are six of them and we wind up taking two because we think they'll be happier if we get two. We love them; they are really great. As if we didn't have enough things producing poop, these little guys make lots of it, but they are great with the litter box. Never any accidents, that is, unless you count the big potted peace lily whose soft dirt wildly attracts them. But when they first moved in, we didn't realize that little cats have so much gas. They'd be under our chair and we'd smell something awful and then we'd be over sniffing Sarah's butt, asking her if she had some kind of mega tuna stinky. These little kitties who barely weighed a pound a piece were producing some whopper farts. They were turn on the ceiling fan and run out of the room laughing histerically kind of farts. I'd accuse Hal and he'd accuse me. It was you! Yuck! No, it was you! It wasn't me!

So because we have, as Hal calls her, "the poopin'-ist dog on the street," and the fartin feline duo, and the toddler who teases us with the new smell my butt comments, we have decided to install a wonderful new invention. The Lysol wall mounted automatic mist air freshener. Every nine minutes we get a quick snort of lavender scented air just to remind our nostrils that there's more to life than "elimination."