Big wet ones

It seems to me that there are two different kinds of parents in the world, the kind who freak out about every possible germ their child can pick up and therefore sterilize everything in the house and have a fit if the baby touches something ooey. The second kind of parent is the kind that lets their child touch and suck on just about anything as long as they won’t choke on it. We, for example, have no problems what-so-ever with letting B eat off of the floor. She will occasionally be walking around, spot an old cheerio on the floor under the table, drop to the floor, crawl between the chairs to retrieve it and eat it. Even worse, B likes to wander aimlessly around the house gnawing away at a peeled apple. Of course, being a toddler with little coordination, she often drops the apple and in the process rolls it in whatever substance happens to be on the floor (usually animal hair) but will quickly pick it up again as per the “5 second rule” and continue on her merry way. No problem for us but I suspect it would be a moment of sheer horror for some parents. Of course it wasn’t always this way with us, during her first 6 months of life we were quite careful to keep everything clean and somewhat sterile but once she became mobile it became impossible to keep up and I haven’t quite figured out how to sterilize the arm of the couch that she likes so much to suck on. Another recent development has forced us to totally throw our hands in the air and admit defeat in the germ front, check out the picture below.














B has begun to give very wet, sloppy kisses to just about anybody. Chance though, gets extra special attention. I figure if she can open mouth kiss an animal who spends half of his day giving himself oral pleasure and the other half in search of rotten animals on the side of the road than whatever else she gets into has got to be pretty harmless comparatively.