Mothers, Children, and Odd Smells

I'd heard that pregnant women have a very sensitive sense of smell.  I could smell Josh's shoes from 10ft away (and they're really not that stinky) when I was pregnant with Landon.  I can sometimes smell Landon's poopy diapers from another room now that I'm pregnant with Jillian. But no one ever mentioned that mothers have an odd sense of smell when it comes to their children.  I had heard that in research studies mom's could smell the clothes of babies and tell which one their own newborn had been wearing.  But no one ever said anything about this sensitive or odd smelling ability continuing into motherhood.  So, as I post this, I'm not sure if it's that I'm odd, or that motherhood produces a superhuman smelling quality.....

My first experience with this mommy-sense-o-smell thing was in the hospital with Landon. We had sent him to the nursery so we could get a few hours of sleep. In the middle of the night they brought him to me so I could feed him.  As I held him, I couldn't smell him.  I had just put on lotion on my hands and they had given him a bath.  I couldn't smell him, and because it was dim in the room, it was difficult to see all his features. I honestly had a moment of panic that they had brought me the wrong baby or switched him with another baby in the nursery -- all somewhat hormone/lack of sleep induced irrational panic, but sheer panic none-the-less.  I couldn't smell him and it was horribly difficult to feel sure this was MY baby. 

Then, as we progressed into parenthood and figuring out all that entails, we often had discussions surrounding Landon's bowel movements.  I had always thought my friend Allen Austin was so weird for constantly talking about his child's poop, but suddenly Josh and I were in nightly conversations about Landon's poop.  We were telling other people all about his pooping. Suddenly, Allen wasn't so weird, but I realized that my friends without kids probably thought I was.  Anyway, as Josh and I would discuss Landon's poop, the topic of smell came up.  For the first 5 months Landon was strictly breastfed and breastfed babies' poops don't smell as bad or as strongly as formula-fed babies or babies who have started eating  baby food.  Josh commented on how Landon's poops did smell, but not too badly.  I commented that they smelled like "BUTTERED POPCORN" to me.  Josh looked at me like I was crazy!  I even told my mother-in-law and she told me I was crazy too!  But I SWEAR to you, his early poops smelled like Buttered Popcorn.  I don't know if other mothers have had this odd experience of their child's poop smelling like appealing food rather than intestinal excrement.  I don't know if this is just the weird mommy-sense-o-smell thing or if I'm really odd.

Most recently Landon smells like SYRUP to me.  At first, I thought it was because we were eating waffles or pancakes in the morning, but we haven't been eating syrup at breakfast for about 2 weeks now.  Today and yesterday Josh fed him a nutrigrain bar and an egg for breakfast.  When Landon came upstairs after eating to say good morning to me, all I could smell was syrup.  As if he had bathed in it.  What's the deal?!

Buttered popcorn poop and a syrup-reeking child can be justified in that these smells are attributed to MY child.  No matter how odd they sound, or how odd the whole thing makes me, it's still something between mother and child that can be justified as such.  HOWEVER, last week I had a weird smell thing with someone else's baby.... 
Last week some friends came over with their babies.  My friend Jessica has a 2 month old named Charlie.  Charlie has reflux and is on medication and a "sensitive" formula because of the reflux.  I held Charlie for a little while, smelling her sweet-smelling head (although it doesn't smell as sugary as my syrup-smelling 18 month old).  She began to cry and squirm so I changed her position and put her over my shoulder. Sure enough, she spit up all over my shoulder.  Later that afternoon, after my friends had left, I kept smelling babies, and an occasional whiff of spit up.  I thought I was going crazy, my pregnancy-sense-o-smell thing was making me smell babies!  But then I realized I hadn't changed my shirt so I was smelling Charlie and her spit up on my shirt.  Here's the weird part---the spit up was a PLEASING smell.  So pleasing that I didn't change my shirt because I wanted to keep smelling babies.  What?!  Spit up from someone else's baby smelled good?!  This makes no sense!  Even my own child's spit up would smell sour to me. 

Someone, please, make sense of this for me!  Is it pregnancy and it's weird effects on our sense of smell?  Is it motherhood and I might as well get used to it?  How do these examples make logical sense?!