Daycare smells funny

I don’t like the way Kaitlyn smells when she comes home from daycare. It’s not a bad smell, just different, and distinct. Like when you walk into someone else’s house.

I notice it as soon as I pick her up and it reminds me that someone else has been taking care of her all day, watching her play, teaching her and making her smile. It takes about an hour for her to smell “normal” again, about the same amount of time I feel that it takes for us to reconnect and her to be okay with not being in my arms.

It took me a while to realize what was different about her every day when we came home and once I realized that it was a distinct scent, and that I was unconsciously smelling her as soon as I got her into my arms, I started to look into the idea of what we can learn about each other through smell. It turns out that mothers can identify their children through smell (no surprise there), that there actually is such a thing as “old-person smell” and, most interestingly, that humans have long used smell to get to know one another and for inner assurance that the other person is familiar.

This article tells us that pheromones are responsible for those familiarity smells, but I still don’t know what makes her smell so different. Her pheromones haven’t changed, and her daycare doesn’t have a distinct smell to it when I walk in the door, so what gives? My guilty working-mom conscience tells me that it’s nature’s way of reminding me that I haven’t been doing my job, or encouraging me to bond with her again and get her normal smell back.

Does anyone else experience this? Is there something different about your child when you've been away from them for a day or more?