The other night we were putting up Halloween decorations and we needed small nails. I was looking on shelves in the garage, digging through former peanut butter containers that now contain various hardware-type gadgets, without any luck. At one point my daughter, who had joined in the search, came over to me, thrust a peanut butter “jar” (it’s plastic, not glass, so does that still count as a “jar”?) and said, “Does this smell like insulin to you?”
Yes, I did stick my nose in that “jar” and yes, it definitely smelled like insulin. The following questions came out of that experience: 1) What was in that “jar” that smelled? 2) Why does insulin smell? and 3) How does my daughter know what insulin smells like?
It never ceases to amaze me that my kids pick up on random diabetes things like how insulin smells. I’m sorry they even have to experience that. But thanks for paying attention! Hopefully they were also paying attention when I explained that when I take my fast-acting insulin I need to eat within a certain amount of time (as opposed to answering questions, helping with homework, or some other distraction that always seems to happen when I’ve just taken meal-time insulin). Anyway, kids are amazing. And kids of parents with diabetes just happen to be extra cool.