Mystery Ass Smell

For the past week our downstairs closet has been stinking to high heaven. This closet is situated in the living room and is a walk-in the length of half of the living room, so it's big and has no closet light. Since all of the kids' toys get shoved in there at night, the closet gets thrown open every morning by the kids ready to ransack and pillage what's in there...and lately, every time they'd open the door a pestilent aroma would come jumping out at us and literally make me want to surrender my innards to the nearest toilet bowl.

Day after day I would go in there with a flashlight, pull out all the toys, search high and low for what the offended odor was coming from and every day would find nothing although the next day the mystery ass smell would come back with a vengeance. I was sure that there was a dirty diaper or rotting bottle of milk hidden in a crevice somewhere...that's what it smelled like. I prayed night and day that a sewer line hadn't burst underneath the house because, lord knows, that would be one unwelcome expense.

So, yesterday, my son decided he wanted to play with his tiny Legos. These are the kind his sister can't be around because she might decide to eat and then choke on one of those miniscule pieces and have thus been relegated to a high shelf in the closet. When I pulled down the Lego bucket the smell of death intensified and when I opened the Lego lid I was impaled in the face by noxious fumes that could easily have come from a rotting slice of roadkill....Legos? Really? What the hell? So I started sifting through the tiny pieces until I found, comfortably adhered to my finger, a rotting, hairy, slime covered piece of brocolli. Have mercy. I had no idea that a piece of broc no more than an inch tall could emanate such repugnance. And how on earth did brocolli make it in the Lego bucket?? So the mystery smell is solved, but now I have to figure out how my kids get their veggies to hide amongst their toys.....or is my husband the culprit?