I didn’t remember having written about how Kina has called me stinky in the past, but apparently I have. I should have figured—being smelly is a key component of our shared sense of humor, and not a day goes by when my daughter doesn’t accuse me of stinkin’ up the joint. Here’s the thing: It is she who is stinky. Long gone are the days when I would hold her little head up to my nose and inhale the floral baby scent—the smell of bonding! Now, she comes in from a day outside and I can tell how sweaty she is from three feet away. Worse, the rainbow unicorn furry boot slippers that she’s been wearing more or less non-stop since Christmas have grown increasingly rank (see the second headline from our February 6th edition), and she has refused to allow us to launder them. (Somehow her preternatural sense of smell has not picked up on this development, which is a pity.) It has finally reached the point where my comments about her stinky feet have no jokey aspect; the kid is funky. Still, she takes every opportunity to turn my routine accusations about her odors back upon me, claiming that various parts of me are stinky, and that my very existence is olfactorily offensive. This is what I get for the jokes. This morning, I swiped her slippers off and ran them down to the laundry for a hot bath. I let the newly-sanitized booties dry on the radiator and fluffed them up with a hair dryer. They smelled of fabric softener sheets and terrycloth. We’ve placed them next to her bed, where she likes to see them in the morning; she’ll put them on tomorrow at dawn, before she does anything else. I give that terrycloth smell about three days, but she’ll call me stinky by 6:30 in the morning.
dad