Evolution

If you're upstairs in our house, you won't hear anything downstairs besides our dogs barking bloody murder at the mailman. And you have to understand how loud that is because our mailman is very squirrelly, and all our dogs ever want to do is kill squirrels.

We've had people stay upstairs and people live upstairs, and all report utter calm even when I play God of War downstairs with volume higher than Poseidon's rage.

Well since we moved our bedroom upstairs, we've figured out that Julie possesses a sense of hearing that would shame a rabbit. And that's weird because Julie's ears are the size of croutons. But I could be carving "Welcome, [Baby's name]!" into a pumpkin and Julie would come downstairs all groggy and ask me if I could have possibly squished the guts any louder.

It makes sense, though. I bet way back in the day when it mattered, a bunch of random new cave-mothers experienced increased hearing. It was a genetic anomaly but one so beneficial to survival that natural selection kicked in. Some cave-woman ancestor of Julie's heard a flock of hungry pterodactyls approaching and was able to heave a boulder in front of the cave's mouth not a second too soon, so now I have to watch Boston Legal reruns with lower volume.

Ooh, I just thought of something else totally scientific. Julie's sense of smell, pre-pregnancy, was intolerable. "Did you eat Funyons?" she would ask a week after a Funyon binge. I'd be like "Um a week ago, and I've brushed, flossed, and used mouthwash roughly 25 times since then," and she'd be like "You're grody." Then we'd be in a restaurant and she'd call the water poisonous even though it smelled like water.

But since pregnancy, she hasn't complained about random smells nearly as much. The reason is that once again back in the day, a bunch of cave-mothers randomly had smelling failure when the baby was born. And those mothers were more likely to care for their babies because they weren't as grossed out by them, and the new mother smelling deficiency was thereby passed down. So now you know, boys and girls, why mothers often have increased hearing and decreased smell. Find me during office hours if you have any questions.

Or it could be that my wife is just weird.