Something's Rank in Denmark

Okay, not really, not that I know of anyway,  I just happen to love Shakespeare and Hamlet is my favorite play of his. The drama unfolds in Denmark and as much as I am Italian, I'm Danish as well.  It just makes sense. (I know, your going, "huh?"...just roll with it) Anyway, when something stinks, the above title is usually my response to whatever it is. It's a complete paraphrasing of a couple lines from the play, so don't quote me. This time around I had to say it in my head and do some deductive reasoning.

So Food-sters, (like my new name for you? I seem to be into naming everything lately.) if you are by nature squeamish about poop or talking about it, do not continue on. I'm going to talk about UN-appetizing things this post, but surprisingly it's still about food! It's always about food, really...except maybe for the Bump-it episode, no, wait, there was something about chowing down on crap food, if memory serves me right.

Moms and Dads, you will be able to relate especially well to this story. Not-yet parents you will too, because inevitably everyone has encountered a nasty diaper at one time or another.

We were in the waiting room. With 3 toddlers, your always in a waiting room for something. I find it's my home away from home, so when we go, I pack big. I've got an arsenal of snacks, drinks, enough diapers for a small country of babies, wipes, natural antibacterial hand spray (it's made of thyme oil! who knew? Whole Foods is where you can get it), extra underwear (for the 3 year olds), extra clothes, usually an over-ripe banana stuck in the side pocket, phone, business cards, toothpicks with tea-tree oil, trash, stickers, my wallet, camera, Epi-pen, Benedryl, ibuprofen and my journal with a handful of Sharpies...of course. Don't know why I felt so compelled to share the entire list, but I certainly feel much better now that I did.

This is the bag I affectionately call "The Pit".

We do the usual wait time and thankfully, this particular waiting room is awesome. Movies, tons of play stuff and other kids to play with. The toddlers are toddling and Tiny is teetering. He's trying to keep up with his brother, but he looks more like Frankenstein that's had one too many margaritas. So freakin' cute. I see a lot of moms sitting and staring blankly at their iPhones the whole time and I'm sitting there staring at my kids, to make sure they don't eat some one's half eaten toasted O off of the floor, shove a piece of trash up their nose or steal an unsuspecting baby's snack. When ever I try to be cool and hip and look like I'm busy on my phone, something always happens, so I rarely do it anymore. I gave that up and now I'm elbowing kids out of the play kitchen and fighting a 4 year old for the metal strainer. She knows nothing about pappardelle.  Once a foodie, always a foodie.

We were wrapping things up and it was time to leave. I was chatting with one of the women that works there and all of a sudden there was a wafting of something. You know when you get a whiff of "something" and it comes and goes so suddenly that you dismiss it? That's what it was the first couple of times and I thought someone had just "cut the cheese", as it were. You know kids, always rippin' 'em, wherever, whenever. No biggie.

Then this smell became fouler, ranker, nay, straight-up wretched. I was now looking around, trying not to look to obvious, but really wanting to know where it was coming from. It was growing like a big shadow on the wall, like in an old black and white horror movie. It was slowly encompassing the entire waiting room. It got so bad that I actually stopped the conversation with my friend and started calling my kids over to me one by one.

I went first to the youngest as he's the most apt to pooping his pants. I pick him up, holding him like a piece of lumber and peek into the leg of his diaper. Clear. I call over my other two, really not expecting to see anything, because they don't poop in their underwear anymore (thank God!). I check both of them and they were clear too. Hmmmph. All the while my friend is looking at me a little confused. For our entire conversation, I've had my face contorted and sniffing the air like Bambi's mother and it was not for a human with a gun but a human with a dump. I was dumbfounded. I just figured that somebody else's kid pooped their pants and we tried to continue the conversation.

She finally acknowledged the now-overwhelming smell. Okay, now this is where I'm going to get kinda gross. One must always define a smell when telling a stinky smell story, it's absolutely paramount. What it smelled like was a mixture of airplane toilet, rotten fish and death.

My friend goes into the office to grab me a handout on something and when she comes back out, she's surrounded by an aura of revelation. That smell, that horrid smell was some body's lunch being microwaved into a gastronomical version of the atomic bomb. Oh my! I gasped as she told me. The mystery was solved and I was even more confused than before.

It never occurred to me in the slightest that it was FOOD! I've smelled many a dishes over the years, but obviously not enough. As far as poo goes, I'm the queen. I've see it, smelled it, cleaned it all...trust me. Regardless of my poop qualifications and love of food, I still would have guessed it was the result of a bodily function not culinary chaos. If I was dangling over a cliff by my eyelashes and had to answer the question: Is this a poo smell or a food smell? I would surely plummet to my death.

So we meandered off the beaten path today. Yes, it involved food, what kind I have no idea. I truly hope it tasted better than it smelled for the sake of the consumer.

Some days we just have to do something different.

Cheers my dears!