The Roc Smells Like Baby Powder

One of the dirty little secrets you learn when you have a baby is that baby powder is not actually necessary. At best, it is useless; sprinkle it in the diaper area and you will end up with a sticky pee-powder paste. At worst, it's dangerous; talc is a carcinogen, after all. Yet everyone loves the smell of baby powder, including, apparently, babies.

Though we never actually used it on him, The Roc somehow discovered that baby powder smells good. We keep a bottle of the cancer-free cornstarch-based variety in the bathroom, and he likes to dust his hands with it after he brushes his teeth every night, just so he can fall asleep to the scent of whatever the heck makes baby powder smell like baby powder.

One day, The Roc was napping--or so I thought--when he suddenly emerged from his room absolutely covered in baby powder. His hair, his face, his hands, his once-black Baby Gap jeans: all snowy white. If not for the distinctive, overpoweringly baby-fresh scent, I would have thought he'd survived an explosion of some kind. I ran into his bedroom; it looked like a baby powder bomb had gone off in there. It was hard to get a straight answer out of The Roc, but eventually he revealed that he'd tried to sprinkle baby powder on his pillow so it would smell good during his nap. How that sprinkle turned into a quarter-inch-thick layer of baby powder blanketing The Roc's room, I guess we'll never know.