Understandable.

Funny thing though, your own child’s poop does not smell as disgusting to you as other children’s. When I had my daughter two of my friends also had daughters within a few months. Since we all had infants at the same time, there was a lot of joint care and hanging out together. To me, the other two’s diapers absolutely reeked. I always thought it was because they were fed a mix of breast milk and formula while mine was breast milk alone. Later, they gave their babies juice while I watered down and limited juice with my daughter and gave her fruit flavored water instead.

To be clear here because of the hyper competitiveness around motherhood, I’m not making a judgement about their choices, what’s important is that babies are fed and healthy, I’m just pointing out that different diets will lead to different smells of the body’s excretions whether we’re talking about sweat, sebum, urine, feces, or others.

Then one day, one of them said something about how bad my Urchling’s poops smelled. They were half sisters and apparently had been having some discussion, wondering what in the world I’d been feeding my child to make her drop such reeky bombs. And the hilarity ensued when I admitted I’d been wondering the same thing about them and their dimpled darlings.

So now my working theory is that all shit stinks, diet influences smell to some extent, but also moms have a degree of nose blindness to their own child’s gastrointestinal offerings as a survival mechanism of the species. That way new moms are less likely to leave their newborns on the trash heap since that’s clearly where they smell like they belong. I also think this nose blindness falls within families somewhat. Isn’t evolution grand?

Hey. It’s a theory.