I have the nose of a bloodhound...

I have a long history of smelling stuff other people don't smell. Especially my husband. You can imagine how much I enjoy the heightened sense of smell that pregnancy brings. Here's a little background.

Before we had kids, in fact I was probably pregnant at the time, I woke up one night and swore I smelled smoke. I woke my husband up to get him to smell it. He could smell nothing. I kept insisting it was smoke and we searched the house but could not find the source. I could not sleep with the smell, it was making me feel queasy...probably from being pregnant. Anyway I made him take me to my brother's house in the middle of the night to sleep on his couch. Since my brother was out of town, I made my husband stay with me. He was royally pissed. He thought it was a figment of my imagination AND he was too tired to drive across town.

The next day the A/C was out at our house. Turns out some circuit had burned a hole through something in the unit. Hmmm. Not my imagination, exhibit A.

Moving on a few years later. There was a funk in our house. I of course smelled it before anyone else. I tried taking out the trash, searching the laundry. Couldn't find the source. When it got really bad, I enlisted the help of my dad, whose nose is only slightly better than my husband's. I thought the smell was either coming from our half bath dowstairs next to the garage, or from the actual garage. It was a loooong weekend of me trying to hunt down the smell. My husband and father were pretty convinced it was some kind of sewer smell coming from the vent in the bathroom sink. They were literally minutes from busting a hole in the bathroom wall when I began snooping again in the garage. I found the culprit. My husband had put some grass runners in a bucket of water with the intention of taking them out to the land to plant. They were completely fermented and gross. AND stinky. My nose was right again, Exhibit B.

LAST NIGHT. I wake up with the baby at about 6am. As I am trying to get her back to sleep, I notice a chemical smell. Hmmm. I am so tired I can't imagine what it is. I sniff her, I sniff me. Just for giggles I sniff her again, this time in the diaper region. No, she has not pooped paint thinner. Hmm. I began to search. Our bathroom, bedroom and the upstairs hall are stonger than the rest of the upstairs. I wake up my poor mom who is sleeping in the guest room. I ask her to see if she smells something. Yes she does. It gets stronger downstairs and it is overpowering in the garage. I open the front door to see if it is coming in from outside. No, fresh air out there. I call my husband who is minutes from home. I tell him that there is a strong odor of gasoline in the house. He has no idea what it could be. He suggests maybe a gas truck unloaded during the night at a station upwind of the house. Uhhg here we go again me versus him. When will he accept that I know something about SMELLS!!? I ask him if maybe he shouldn't open the garage door because of the fumes. Nah, it will be alright he says. I move the kids downstairs and open some windows. He says he smells it in the garage. Really? Cause it could overpower a moose out there! Anyway, he just can't imagine what it could be. I ask him what in the garage has gas in it. Answer: 5 (five) gas cans, a leaf blower, a weedeater, and a generator. Oh and a pump for the water well (fiasco). {I have decided to add fiasco to the end of water well from now on.}

Well I wonder could one of those NINE things containing gas be putting off the smell. No he says he checked and none of them are leaking. Well, I ask him to move them outside. Please. Just in case, and then maybe we can air out the garage. He does so, bless his heart, grudgingly.

He comes in when his is done and says it turns out the gas cut off valve was leaking gas onto the generator. The nose knows again. Exhibit C!!

I was gracious enough not to say I told you so. To him.

Now I have to say my husband is nice enough to give into most of my whims, even when they are ridiculous. And boy do I have some ridiculous whims. (Which probably explains the look he gave me when I asked him to move all the gas containers outside.) But I won't go into that here. If my husband wants to then he can get his own blog. ;)