The Smell Source

I have been confounded by a smell.   It’s on my side of the bed and can only be smelled when I’m facing the edge of the bed.   It smells like urine, which would likely be dog urine if that’s what it is.   Only it’s been infernally hard to locate.  

You’d think this would be an easy task: the dog peed, she’s a girl so she squats, the odor is located in one area—get down and sniff until you find the spot.   Simple.  Find the problem, clean it up.   Only I couldn’t.   I have a reasonably accurate sense of smell which has served me well over the years.   If I could smell it in the air then the main source must be more intense.

Imagine me on hands and knees on the side of the bed with my nose in the carpet—go ahead, it’s a funny image.  Imagine me down there carefully smelling everything in a wide radius including under the bed which is high enough for me to wedge my head under.   Nothing.   Not a hint and definitely nothing that would knock me back on my heels and yelling out to my husband, “I found it!”

Even so, I sprayed pet and carpet biological cleaner and then put Capture powder on the whole area which I vacuumed it up hours later.   No go, that night the smell still persisted.

Could it be the pillow?  That would make sense, close to my nose, only on one side, maybe the dog climbed up during a thunderstorm when we were out.   But the pillow only smelled like a normal pillow.   Bedding?   A king-sized comforter is a lot of area to smell, but I smelled all the areas on the side of the bed and area I was getting the smell from.   Nothing raised an odor flag so I moved on.

We had had this problem once before, which made me wonder if it wasn’t urine at all.   We had had the carpets cleaned.  An inexperienced employee wanting to make sure he did a thorough job on our bedroom ended up over saturating the carpet, getting the carpet pad wet in the process.   This resulted in a high humidity level and an unpleasant smelling situation.    It took a week with a dehumidifier in  bedroom to get the smell to abate after that.   That smell at that time was similar to what I was smelling now.

So I brought in the dehumidifier and ran it for a day and then when that didn’t fix the smell I got desperate—I asked my husband to see if he could find the smell.   He did the same searching around for the scent as I’d done.   He thought he’d found it several times but after I’d smelled it and said I didn’t smell anything, he’d go back and say he agreed.   At different times we each thought we might have smelled something, but if it was the source, it should have been strong, pungent and repugnant and we just weren’t getting that.

This is all based on the urine hypothesis in the first place, which I was only jumping to because of the dog’s recent health changes.   She’s never urinated in the house, holding it for hours and hours and never complaining.   Recently she’s been put on additional medications, one that’s diuretic which makes her thirsty (therefore needing to urinate more) and one that is hard on the kidneys.   So it could have been the dog, I thought.

I was getting desperate so I took the comforter and put it in the living room, wondering if I’d missed some spot in my nasal explorations a few days before.   I pulled the sheets off.    I smelled the mattress.   I smelled the side of the mattress.   I went into the living room and sniffed all around and over the comforter.   I got nothing definitive.   But to be sure, I stuck the sheets and comforter in the washing machine and added scented fabric softener for good measure.   Then I emptied the dehumidifier and waited for the laundry to be done.

That night I’m pretty sure I didn’t smell the smell.  I wasn’t completely sure, what with the lovely floral scent now emanating from the comforter.   Three days later it hasn’t come back in force, so I think it must have been the comforter or sheets.   I’m going with that as my working diagnosis unless the smell comes back.  Case closed (hopefully).

The Big Boy Update:  Did I mention my son can weaponize anything?  It was concerning for a while, but with some guidance he’s gotten it under control now.  He mostly likes  to emulate poses and look at himself in the mirror.   As a tangential note, my son has decided he likes to brush his hair to  look “handsome” which is a new development from the hated hair brushing of prior months.   Today he came running out of our bedroom saying, “Mom, did you know your hair brush has a gold spike in it?”  It does indeed have a gold spike which can be pulled out from end of the handle and used to help more accurately part hair.   My son was so thrilled with this discovery he spent twenty minutes in the living room posing and doing “moves” with the brush as his new super power weapon.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came home two days ago humming a new song.   She does this frequently and it’s not uncommon for the song to be something she’s made up.   It’s more common it’s a song they’ve sung in school or after school.  Usually I have little chance of figuring out the song.    However this bit she was humming sounded very familiar.   It involved something like, “doo oo oo, ahh ahh ahh, something something something”.   She had done this several times when I asked her where she heard the song because I had a hunch.   She told me it was Riley’s song.   Okay, my hunch was getting stronger now.   The class had listened to the class CDs, which included one song submitted by each child as their favorite.   After hearing that I pulled up my phone and searched for “De do do do, De da da da” by The Police and started playing it.  My daughter immediately cried out, “that’s it!”