OVER THE RAINBOW

^^^There's a super cute sleeping baby in that carseat. Also, when your cell phone is all you have to take pictures with, you sometimes prop it on the ground against your diaper bag. Those green rainbows have served me well for over three years. I got them early in our marriage as a consolation for the pair that broke when Conrad made me go on a walk on a particularly rocky beach on a particularly dark night. I had to walk the distance back barefoot. In case you've never walked on a rocky beach at night, it's like walking through snow that has hidden shards of glass in it. It hurts, and then it hurts worse.

I went to the Rainbow Factory (sounds like something out of My Little Pony. Oh, it is.) to exchange a pair that were gifted me that were a tad too narrow (this mama's feet got wider in pregnancy. Cue side glare to precious baby). When you walk into the building, which looks like a little bamboo shack right in the middle of a transitioning residential/commercial road, you're hit smack in the face with the smell of leather. Only it smells like garbage until you realize that it's shoes, and then it still smells bad, but you like it because it's shoes, not garbage. 

Some smells are good. Books. Freshly sharpened pencils. Cut grass. Cinnamon candles. 

Other smells, like leather shoes, are not, but we like them anyway because of what they are. Like when my baby smells milky. What it is is that there's milk souring in the folds of his neck and he needs a bath. But to me, it smells like sweet baby, The Boss, The Hen. Or sometimes the beach (hear me out). Not always, but sometimes, the beach smells like dead fish or mildew, or if there's a dead seal on the other side of the jetty, it smells like there's a dead seal on the other side of the jetty. But because it's the beach, we don't mind much. Unless there really is a dead seal. That's disgusting. 

All this to say: I got my new pair of Rainbows (the light brown ones, but still darker than the tan ones) and I love them, and when they are in small quantities, like one, you can't really smell it at all.