Wow. It’s been a heavy few weeks. Hopefully, they’re behind us. Things in our house are getting back to our new normal and I finally had a few minutes to slow down and really pay attention to my kids.

The first sign that I have been a little lax in the attention department came when I walked upstairs during shower time. The air was thick with fake coconut smell. While the first thought that crossed my mind was, “yes, I like piña coladas,” I reined myself in before performing a little impromptu karaoke and realized that showers and coconuts do not go together in our house. The scent was definitely getting stronger as I got closer to the bathroom, and poor E just about jumped out of her skin when I whipped open the shower curtain and said, “What reeks in here?”

To my surprise, she was liberally lathering up her shower puff with … sun block? Yes, apparently in the past few weeks, we started running low on soaps and body washes, and no one thought to mention it to me. Instead, one of them just grabbed a bottle out of the closet and didn’t happen to notice that it was a long-expired bottle of sunblock. Luckily, it was the first night that they had used it as a body wash, but unfortunately for me, E was the third and final shower of the evening.

Two things about sunblock apparently don’t expire: the smell and the waterproofness. The boys both have realized that their short, low-maintenance hair styles allow them to get away with washing it with whatever soap they happen to be using, so not only were they coated with sunblock AFTER their shower, their hair was slicked down as well. Thankfully, E still uses normal shampoo and conditioner, so I didn’t have to try to remove the mess from her hair.

Of course, the hot water ran out about a minute into the second round of showers with actual soap, and neither of the boys appreciated being inspected from head to toe. It was a fun night all around, and ended with me giving the bathroom closet a good purging and a lecture in label reading.

Hygiene hijinks would continue to plague us, however. We’ve been steadily edging toward puberty and all the delightful smells that come along with it. My kids are not always the neatest to begin with, so this has been quite the trial in our house. One of the boys is the absent-minded professor, and things like applying deodorant and Oxy10 just don’t register on his list of important things to do. Our morning routine consists of me confiscating whatever book he has his nose in and sending him back upstairs repeatedly until he smells good.

The other boy has discovered a whole new world of “product” and I have to get him up a little early so he can spend some time in the bathroom grooming himself and applying various potions and arranging his hair. So I was a little confused when he was the one who came home from soccer practice absolutely reeking like a three-day old onion. Even more confused when the same thing happened the next day, and downright exasperated when I had to drive home from his soccer game with the windows open because the smell was so bad.

The WH and I made an agreement. He’s the expert in all things boy since he is one, and dealing with two boys is completely equal to me dealing with one girl, so this should have been his problem to solve. As luck would have it, he was out of town and the crisis couldn’t wait.

On more than one occasion, I’ve been able to employ the industrial techniques that I’ve learned on the job to be a better parent, and this was one of them. I sat the boys down for a process observation and root cause analysis. I dragged them both in, because if one of them was making a mistake, it was a certainty that the other one probably was, too.

Turns out, he didn’t realize that he had to turn the little wheel on the bottom of the container to push more deodorant out and he had just been rubbing a piece of plastic under his arms for about a week. Thankfully it was a simple exercise in training, and he was just as delighted as I was to return to smelling like “cool waves” instead of “hoagie left in a warm car.”

Kids. Even when they’re smelly, they’re fun. Good thing for me that I uncovered a few boxes of hair dye when I was cleaning out the closet. I have a few more grays to take care of this week.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.