I don't know what, exactly, this "baby smell" is that connoisseurs and fanatics wax eloquently about. I see them burrowing their noses through the hair of infants, inhaling deeply with a look of contentment and wonder.
For a very long time after my baby's birth all I could smell on him was... well... birth. It smelled like flesh. It smelled raw. For a long time afterward, I smelled like that too and I did not like it. I do not mean to say that my baby's smell repulsed me. Only, that he smelled to me like what he was. A person newly made of flesh and blood.
A friend of mine suggested that the "baby smell" people rave about is really the perfume of the powders and shampoos we use on them.
Now the baby is almost two and, oddly, he has indeed developed a smell that I have become very attached to, that I even long for sometimes. He has snot breath. I hate snot, it's completely gross, yet his sour little breath of milk and mucous has me totally enthralled. I can only compare it to the guilty pleasure of enjoying the peepee smell of a puppy's breath in your face.
