The Pajama Game On Steroids

Pajamas are serious business in our house. Every night, there's a small-ish battle with Ian and a bigger battle with Daniel as to exactly which pair of pajamas they will wear that night. Usually they want to wear pajamas that are in the laundry, and the pinnacle of the pajama hierarchy is Scooby Doo. Thomas, "Wrecking Ball Man", Spider Man, Batman, have all taken a back seat to Scooby Doo. Moreover, Scooby Doo is the only outfit for which both boys have identically matching (other than size) pajamas, which means that if one of them wears Scooby Doo, the other must match it.

Tonight, I stipulated no videos until both boys are in their pajamas (Benji, in this case, in the tradition of our 70's-centric cinema time-warp...). Ian eagerly went upstairs and emerged within a matter of minutes in pajamas. Daniel continued to be Daniel, more or less oblivious to this blatant coercion. I was fine with that; if they wanted to watch the rest of Benji (they started it before I came home), then both of them would have to be in pajamas, and I could wait indefinitely...

However, things got much more exciting when Ian decided on a pajama-upgrade. Ian decided to go "Scooby", and suddenly Daniel became very invested in The Great Game. The problem was that Daniel's matching Scooby-Doo pajamas were in the laundry basket, presumably dirty, but he still wanted to wear them. Ian, never in any rush for Daniel to "catch up" to him, additionally has a sincere preoccupation with cleanliness, and between those two factors, the story ended up with Daniel screaming for his "dirty" pajamas and Ian denying them to him.


To his credit, Ian started out relatively altruistic. I think he was actually wearing his not-quite-matching Scooby Doo pair (yes, Ian has two...), and he told me, "I'm wearing the ones that I like less so that me and Daniel can both, when his pajamas are clean... [wear the ones that match]." In other words, he was saving up the Scooby Doo pajamas of choice for a night when Daniel could share in the splendour.

This is where it gets gray; Daniel's threshold for "dirty" pajamas is extremely arbitrary. It seems all he has to do is wear them once, and they're tainted. It was very unusual tonight that he was willing to override this particular neurosis, but Ian covered in Scooby-Doo-brown was enough to bring him over to the other side. But it was Ian who was now blocking progress. It was up to me to arbitrate, and I came up with a special formula.

I decided I would take a quick sniff of Daniel's pajamas - maybe around the chest - and if they smelled "worn" then he'd have to wear something else, but if they seemed just a day old or so, then I'd let him wear them. Ian decided to join the cause - perhaps with the assumption that the pajamas would fail the smell test, and Daniel would have to settle for his blue wrecking-ball pajamas, or something equally undistinguished.

Ian was eager to resolve the crisis, so he volunteered his own wardobe as the "control set" of the experiment. As I was making supper, he came by and welcomed me to smell his pajamas. I sniffed his shoulder, for whatever reason, and it bore the delicate fragrance of "Ultra" Tide detergent for High Efficiency washers. No pajamas could smell more perfect. This rather "upped the ante" for Daniel's evaluation. Ian summed up the bouquet: "That's how it smells when you haven't weared it at all" - that is, an entirely pristine pair of Scooby-Doo's, fresh from the twin Samsung industrial strength washer and drier that dominate our downstairs bathroom.

Ian at one point checked in and asked, "Daddy, didn't you smell his pajamas yet?"

I was in no hurry to smell Daniel's pajamas, but as I continued to make supper, Ian lured him into the kitchen by running away from him with that highly coveted prize, a small hunk of rice puff wafer, or whatever it's called. Daniel rose to the occasion and chased him for it, at which point Ian whispered to me that he had chased Daniel into the kitchen so that I could smell his pajamas.

At that point, even I couldn't resist: resolution was right around the corner, and we could all get on with our lives. So I bent over, hovering over young Daniel's Scooby-Doo chest, and took a whiff...

Pure Tide. The smell of a suburban air vent on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon in May - maybe some upper-middle-class town on the outskirts of Detroit... The smell of American quality-of-life, for which the entire globe envies us to the point of guerilla-madness. The scent of freedom. One sniff was more than enough empiricism for me.

The story ends with two boys and their baby sister, all smelling vaguely April-fresh, watching in rapture as a shaggy, loveable mutt gallops across the 70's set as Burt-Bachrach-like singing croons in the background. With another much-loved dog on their matching pajamas, in patterns of brown and blue and yellow. Madeleine didn't have Scooby Doo; she had to settle for Sleeping Beauty, but she was just as happy.

Scooby is a uniter, not a divider.

(October 13, 2009)