A few years before kids came along, my roommate happened to be one of my good friends. This particular friend lived with "CDO"--which as the joke she told goes, is OCD, only in alphabetical order like it should be. She kept everything quite nearly sterile in the apartment (not gonna lie--I loved it). She jumped into the parenting world about two years before Abriella entered the world, and good naturedly took the teasing that her son would be the cleanest little boy in the world, with the weakest immune system due to lack of exposure to dirt. Her sister, also one of my close friends, told me one afternoon that every time she saw her nephew she was going to make it a point that the kid got to play in a bit of dirt.
I have slight CDO tendencies myself. I know that, and as a result...I've become more than a little obsessive about NOT being obsessive about things when I'm aware of them. Did you catch all that? Okay. good.
Abriella is 13 months old. She walks, she talks, and lately...she picks stuff up. This is fine at home.
"Yes, Abby, that is your teddy bear. Can Mama give him a hug?"
"Yes, you found the microscopic piece of paper that was under the table. Good job!"
"Thank you, sweetie, for bringing Mommy every single item from your toy box. I always wanted to be buried alive!"
...Today, at the park, not so much. It's hot here in the south, a wet, sticky kind of hot. So we were out for our walk rather early...the grass still felt squishy and damp, and just a bit cool. Abby loves to play in the grass, and especially...loves to pick up things she finds in it. Or, perhaps, the stuff in the wood chip filled playground. Like chewed gum.
"Yes, Abby, that is chewed up gum. It's trash. Let's go put it in the trash can..."
I lifted her up, she dropped the wad of discolored pink-ish gum stuck to a large piece of wood into the trash can, I set her down and was thinking about getting a Wet One out. But it's just a little dirt, right? It's good for her immune system. Besides, she's teething and not letting that pacifier out of her sight (despite me thinking I really had found all of them and got rid of them)...so it'll be fine.
And she's walking off towards a lovely old oak tree anyway.
And she's bending over.
"Mama? MAMA!"
She turns, holding out what obviously must be one finger of a rubber glove. I snatch it from her hand and in .000001 second, it's in the trash.
Another .000001 second passes and that individually packaged Wet One is open and her hands are clean.
And I know what you're thinking. And you aren't allowed to say it. Don't even continue thinking it. Because it was one finger off of a large rubber glove. It was very, very clearly a glove in the moment I had it in my hand. It couldn't have been anything else because...there is not enough hand sanitizer in the world.
Two days later, this story is still cracking me up. The upside is that a rubber glove is, even if a bit of a stretch, a viable explanation. Unlike, say, poop. God bless ambiguity.
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