"What's That Smell??"

There are few things I find more disgusting than, say, pulling a sippy cup of old milk out from it's week-long hiatus under our sofa. But lucky me.... today's treat was a pile of dried puke in the corner of Milo's room (and it clearly wasn't from Milo). This is definitely another first. I guess I never thought I would just happen to stumble upon something like this, in part, because I'm usually pretty tuned in to Ella when she says her stomach hurts. Honestly, I figured if she did get sick, (if it wasn't all over me), then she would probably tell me or show me, or somehow I would just know.

Rewind to a few nights ago though and it makes sense: I brought Milo in to his room to feed him and put him down and told Jake that I smelled throw up. He came in the room, sniffed, looked at me and said, "you and that NOSE." Shook his head and left the room. I said, "it's called mom nose and it's quite accurate, thank you very much." I can tell the difference between teething poops, regular poops and dairy allergy poops, smell spit up from across the room, differentiate between a carrot and sweet potato stain on a shirt just by sniffing it, and of all things-- I know vomit when I smell it. Everyone does. It probably takes all of us back to our days in elementary school when some poor kid didn't make it to the bathroom and then the janitor whipped out that horrid orange stuff. Ugh.

So now, I'm stifling the urge to say, "I told you so!"- only slightly stronger than my urge to gag and run for the Lysol. She must have gotten sick while she was playing, then just moved on to something else. I never heard a word from her about it. She has told me that her tummy hurt over the last few days, but she also tells me this often at bedtime as a stall tactic, and has otherwise seemed fine. So for now, I'm just grateful I didn't have to fight going into my "stomach bug OC" mode because well, I didn't know about it. On another level, it's in some way reassuring to me to know that it wasn't even a big enough deal for her to say anything to me, even though I hate that she was sick and I didn't know.

So, lesson learned from my two year old (and one that I'm unfortunately dropping some bones to have to re-learn myself): Life is too fun to let a little puke ruin it.