Germ Repellent

I think babies come with germ repellent built in, like those shirts in mail order catalogues that repel mosquitoes. It's part of the birth package. How else can we explain how they can go around putting everything in their mouths, from rancid Cheerios that rolled under the refrigerator in 1999 to unsanitized shopping cart handles that have been in play for the better part of the last five years. If I put my mouth on the shopping cart handle three things would happen: 1) I would get thrown out of the grocery store, 2) I would contract a horrible disease like hepatitis or tuberculosis, and 3) The store manager would immediately sanitize the cart handle.

My daughter, during the potty training years, loved public restrooms; still does. At age 2, nothing said, make my mother convulse, quite like running her fingers along the edge of the porcelain toilet bowl or getting on the floor on all fours to peer under stall doors. Running with a cascaded strip of toilet paper, looping out of the trashcan, made her giggle like a banshee, while I, on the other hand, sounded the alarm: Eewww, stop that. That's gross. Put it back in there. Wash your hands, again; to which more elation erupts.

Thankfully (or maybe not), like those mosquito repellent shirts, the germ shield, after so many baths, washes off. My daughter, now six, and a complete success of my masterful conditioning through exaggerated repulsion and squeals of disgust, is finally getting it that public restrooms are no place for learning braille.