Smell

In case you're wondering how big Lyla is on the eve of her four-week birthday, she has now eclipsed the Cabbage Patch Preemie, but just in length.

Winter babies can have vitamin-D deficiencies due to relative lack of sunshine, so they often get supplements. The supplements come in a little liquid syringe that you sneak into her mouth during a feeding.

The two possible supplements are Tri-Vi-Sol and Poly-Vi-Sol, meaning a three-vitamin solution or a many-vitamin solution. Lyla's doctor said she could take either one.

Tri-Vi-Sol has a pleasant medicinal smell reminiscent of childhood sniffles and reading Highlights Magazine under a pile of blankets.

When our tiny bottle of Tri-Vi-Sol ran out and Target didn't have more in stock, we opted for Poly-Vi-Sol and later discovered that it smells like sweaty donkey scrotum.

Sorry to spring such a phrase on you. Had I just said "It smells gross," you wouldn't have gotten the full effect. The smell is so vile that you can't help but react viscerally. It's a smell that might cause a tree to suck itself back into the ground. Julie was so convinced that we had gotten a contaminated bottle that we bought another, but alas it was the same.

So we have refused to feed Lyla even a drop of Poly-Vi-Sol. Luckily Babies R Us had Tri-Vi-Sol, so now Lyla will get her vitamin-D without enduring the fetid, putrescent, eye-watering nastiness of whatever the hell is in that other stuff.