What Stinks, I'm Bored and What's For Dinner.

I have three children. Their names are: What Stinks, I'm Bored and What's For Dinner.  What Stinks, is probably the least tactful.  He frequently approaches people, holds his nose and declares loudly, "What stinks?"  It can be very disconcerting when you are the closest and most likely suspect.

Sometimes he says it when I am cooking dinner. 

I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean to be rude, he just has a very over-developed olfactory sense. Sometimes he is more specific and says things like, "Something stinks like garbage!" As he climbs into people's cars. It's a fair enough point when he's getting into our car, which does stink like garbage because of all the garbage left in there by What Stinks, I'm Bored and What's For Dinner.

But other people's cars are a different kettle of fish. If they stink like garbage, it's their business and not something What Stinks should be declaring openly.  He needs to learn to hold his tongue as well as his nose. 

Most recently something began to stink in What Stinks' room. His twin brother, I'm Bored, jumped ship and vacated the room to sleep in more fragrant peace with What's For Dinner.  The irony did not escape any of us: What Stinks lying alone in his room to suffer a stench of mysterious origin. 

It was the sort of stench that grows on you: the longer you stayed in there, the more your nose became accustomed to it and so you didn't notice it so much any more.  Every time I went in there, I would get a fresh wave and begin in earnest to sniff around the room like a bloodhound in a bid to pin it down before I could no longer notice it.  The smell was elusive. It was here, then it was there. The more you tried to pin it down, the more it seemed to just evaporate.

Until you walked out of the room and then walked back in again, when it would return in a fresh wave.

"What stinks?" He wailed. "Something stinks."

I removed all the clothes that were lodged beneath the bed in a stinky wodge. I sniffed them. They just smelled like musty unwashed clothes. I put them in the washing basket.

I sniffed What Stinks.  It wasn't him despite the fact he hadn't bathed for two days.  I sniffed his blanket. Not that either.  I sniffed his giraffe named Pickles. Nope.

I turned to face the door.

It was getting warmer, getting hotter, hot, hot, hot. I moved to the doorway, where the schoolbags were hanging. Hot. Hot. Piping Hot.
I opened the schoolbag that belonged to I'm Bored. Paydirt!

The source; a small tupperware container full of pieces of cooked chicken (I'm Bored, is also known as, What Did You Put In My Lunch? And when told, he declares with a siren sound that he doesn't like [insert what I put in his lunch here] A small container of cooked chicken breast represented our latest truce.)

From the smell and from the fact that it was Sunday night, I surmised that the source was about two days old. Not surprisingly the flesh of a dead animal smells exactly like a dead animal when it is left to putrify in a schoolbag over two days.

The discovery and its fresh unleashing, set off a chorus from either side of the hallway.

"Pwaww!"
"Who did that?"
"What stinks?"
" Mu-um!"


As if I were the one to blame.

Window flung open. Schoolbag hurled out (with all its contents.) Problem solved.

Lights out. Goodnight.