About two weeks ago we put away the step stool which was in front of the boys’ bathroom sink.
It seemed a logical decision. While the stepstool’s original purpose was to help The Squid and The DragonMonkey wash their hands, they were only using it for evil.
We figured it was easier for us to lift them up a couple times a day to wash their hands than to constantly supervise their every movement whenever they disappeared around the corner.
We thought it was a good plan.
Yeah… uh, no.
It wasn’t.
For the past week, several times a day, The Squid has been running up to me and boasting about the fact he has clean hands.
“Hey, Ma! I clean hands! I clean hands!”
And you know what? He was right. He did have clean hands…. which should have clued me in that something was wrong. The Squid is, without equal, the filthiest child I’ve ever met.
Here is a picture of him I took at 9:05 in the morning a few days ago. This picture was taken less than 10 minutes after I took him out of the shower:
“No, Ma. I no eat dirt. I lick dirt. Lick the nummy dirt.”
In retrospect, I should have known.
I should has known there was a creepy reason for his hands to be clean, and I should have asked him why he felt it was necessary to keep mentioning it to me.
Alas, I didn’t figure it out until today.
Today.
Today, when I rounded the corner…. and then stopped dead as I saw The Squid leaning over into the toilet, scrubbing his hands industriously.
And that’s when I realized it.
He wasn’t forgetting a verb in his sentence. He hadn’t been saying “I have clean hands” all those times.
He meant exactly what it sounded like – he had just finished “cleaning” his hands.
Only the last I checked, scrubbing your hands in toilet water several times a day…
in the same toilet your older brother uses…
the same older brother who consistently refuses to flush after he pees….
Well….
Well, that’s the exact opposite of clean.
“I clean hands! Ma, look! I clean hands!”
When I think of all the times I touched his hand this past week, or shared a bag of popcorn with him, or all the other million ways I touched those hands….
Ignorance was bliss.
It was an unsanitary, peaceful bliss.
Oh my! Makes me glad (sometimes anyway) that my daughter is a clean freak. She’d never DREAM of sticking her hands in dat nasty water and even gets on to the dogs when we forget to put the seat down and they use it as their personal water bowl
I recall the story that a colleague told about her father, who grew up very poor in ?Chicago? at the turn of the (20th) century. The library lady wouldn’t allow children with dirty hands to touch her precious books, and there was no public washroom nearby at the time…so before entering the building, the kid would duck into an alley and pee on his hands to clean them off.
The library lady would always inspect him closely and smile when she saw how “clean” his hands were.
Be careful what you wish for, dearies….
Ah the joys of raising boys. I had four of them…trust me it gets better as you go. And when I say better I truly mean worse.
Yeah, I’m no help here. Dude is, well, a disgusting dude. I keep hoping he’ll outgrow it, but I’m not holding my breath.
Funny, as soon as he first said he had clean hands, I though NO! Toilet!
Funny, as soon as he first said he had clean hands, I though NO! Toilet!