There is one thing that people didn’t warn me about when it came to having all boys. The Smell. And when you have a house full of hockey players, it kind of takes on a life of it’s own.
Widely known as Rink Stink, this particular smell is one that I have not previously experienced in my 35 years on the planet. Spend any amount of time on Google or Pinterest searching for hockey related things and you will come up with multiple articles on how to deal with the scourge. Silly me, I hadn’t even considered this would be a concern until my boys starting playing hockey.
Consider this; I grew up on a farm, so I’m accustomed to a certain degree of odd smells. But the wall of stench in the boys’ room is unprecedented for me. Little boys, when they sleep, get sweaty. At least mine do. And when they get sweaty, they get smelly.
But nothing compares to what they have done to my van.
When we were looking at buying a second vehicle, we knew that we would be having three kids. We were waiting for number 2 to make his or her debut (We didn’t find out what we were having before delivering. Drove my sister nuts), and figured that we may as well bite the bullet then and there and go for the minivan.
Oh that poor minivan never saw us coming.
See the thing about our schedule is that the boys’ often end up having their meals on the road.
Which isn’t a bad thing, except that 4 year olds are notoriously messy eaters. So I no sooner clean out my van than it collects another meal’s worth of crumbs.
If I’m lucky, it’s crumbs.
And if that wasn’t cruel enough to my precious carrier of the small people, I now subject it to hockey bags on the regular. Have you ever smelled a change room?
Up until we started with hockey, I hadn’t. Oh how I wish I could return to such innocence.
Take the smell of a wet dog, combine it with the smell of boy, add in some sweat and whatever they pick up on the ice when they are making snow angels and you just about hit the mark.
I got into my van one particularly rainy Tuesday afternoon and just about passed out. So, like any normal parent, I went looking for the source. I cleaned up the seats and threw out the trash. Nothing was helping.
Then I opened the trunk and The Smell slapped me right in the face. The culprit? One novice player’s hockey bag that had been left in my van after the weekend of games and practices.
I brought the bag into the house, left it open for a day.
But to this day, when it rains, my van still exudes the Eau de Hockey Bag and I’m forced to drive with my windows down all the way home.
It drives me crazy to this day that I (not you; that was your choice, I didn’t get a choice) did not know the gender, but man you have 3 wonderful boys.