You could eat off of this floor - oh wait, you already did?

I was a bit of a hypochondriac in college - my medical file when I left was a healthy two inches thick. I should feel embarrassed or at least sheepish, but mostly I still feel a bit proud and that is sick and twisted (no pun intended). So you can imagine the hyperdrive that started as soon as I became pregnant. A good number of hard working, very nice waitresses have sustained the third degree from me about the contents of dishes and the menu and any microscopic trace of unpasteurized cheese or mercury-laced-fish or heaven-forbid-deli-meat. It didn't get much better when the baby was finally born and I was -that- parent that went around sanitizing everything she might touch in public. The edge of that restaurant table that she might chew, that disgustingly sticky high chair that was brought around (very infrequently as we bought a portable high chair almost immediately after she learned to sit upright), that infernal petri dish of germs that is the baby swing at the park, etc. And the octaves that my voice attained when I warned her away from the sandbox were both operatic and comical. But then, life happened.

She dropped her fruit bar on the grass at a picnic and well, it was her last fruit bar and she really loved it and had polished off the "emergency fruit bar" the day before. She decided that eating cheerios was much more fun when dumped on the carpet at home and picking them up one at a time. Some other kid at a playgroup decided that her fruit puree was interesting and wanted a sip before giving it back, or she decided that some other kid's sippy cup was more colorful and therefore worth trying out . . . and then she learned to kiss me with her lips. All of these things facilitate the passage of icky germs (and yes, "icky" is the technical, scientific term I am using here).

But over time, I relaxed and basically just gave up on many of these types of situations. I still wash my hands over twenty times of day (and therefore have doomed my hands and knuckles to a dry, leathery, blood-stained crackling finish, but that's another topic for a different blog), but rather than be the parent who freaks out and alienates everyone else, we deal with the occasional cold and "ick" factor that is parenting and childhood. Perhaps it was the time that we went out for the family-matinee showing of Mama Mia and I realized that she had a blow-out dirty diaper that had exploded all over both of us, or Christmas Eve morning when she threw up for the first and only time all of the spinach and pear puree (it's better than it sounds) over both of us or the time that projectile newborn-poop came flying in arc in front of my face and landed on everything within a three foot radius . . . Fear Factor has nothing up on parenthood. Bring it.