Olfactory Disorientation

Do you ever think you are smelling one thing, and it turns out to be something completely different? This has been somewhat of a theme in our house for the past couple of days.

Yesterday, my son got in the car and was insistent that he was smelling mint. This was meant as a declaration that he WANTED some of whatever minty thing he was smelling. Actually, this particular child normally has an extremely acute sense of smell when it comes to anything that might be sweet. He finds candy in my house by smelling it. He can find candy that is still individually wrapped and sealed in its bag. So when he says he smells mint, there is probably mint somewhere in the quarter-mile radius.

However, on this occasion, I was 99% certain that he was smelling the orange that my older son had peeled in the car. It took about five minutes to get him to accept that he might NOT be smelling mint, but eventually we succeeded in steering the conversation away from the candy he was potentially missing. But it does pose the question, why does an orange smell like mint?

This morning, it was my turn.

I was in the kitchen, giving my toddler some cereal, and I kept smelling tuna. I was walking around the kitchen trying to figure out why the kitchen smelled like tuna. Did my older son make a tuna sandwich for his lunch and not clean it up very well? I was smelling the countertops, examining the three bowls in the sink, and I just couldn't figure it out. Then I realized. I was NOT smelling tuna. I was smelling Crunch Berries.

Why in the world do Crunch Berries smell like tuna? Maybe we have some weird psychological sensory disorder that makes us think we're smelling things we're not? Aliens? What's your theory?