Boys Will Be Boys - A Haiku (all in good fun!)
eighteen month old boy
making a mess in the dirt
boy oh boy oh boy
We had our first run in with dirt last week. Now I'm not talking about your run of the mill garden variety dirt. I'm talking about your 3 day old rain drenched worm infested muddy mud mud. It was thick, it was gooey, and it went right into Baby Boy's mouth. Again and again and again. Until it was glaringly obvious that the "that's yucky; we don't eat dirt" comment I was so vigilantly expressing was simply not going to deter him.
As I tried to wrangle and haul an angry, flailing, monkey back into our house to get cleaned up I realized that this is only the beginning of it. I have a lifetime, or at least somewhere between 18 and 25 years of dirty boy ahead of me. I better get used to it, huh? Once Baby Boy was washed up and involved in a much less messy game of sweeping up cheerios, I indulged in my guilty pleasure of searching the web...is it really safe for toddlers to eat dirt, I wondered? Apparently I wasn't the first - first time mom to question if this age old toddler habit was really harmless. To my delight, baring a nasty iron deficiency that can make kiddos crave dirt (I don't think we are there yet) it is just another one of those 'usually nothing to worry about' toddler experimentations we parents must endure. Funny thing is, watching Baby Boy eat dirt made me realize that as much as I know our world is going to continue to change and technology will evolve, I'm certain as certain could be that a thousand years from now boys will still eat dirt and moms will still wonder, "is this really normal?".
As I tried to wrangle and haul an angry, flailing, monkey back into our house to get cleaned up I realized that this is only the beginning of it. I have a lifetime, or at least somewhere between 18 and 25 years of dirty boy ahead of me. I better get used to it, huh? Once Baby Boy was washed up and involved in a much less messy game of sweeping up cheerios, I indulged in my guilty pleasure of searching the web...is it really safe for toddlers to eat dirt, I wondered? Apparently I wasn't the first - first time mom to question if this age old toddler habit was really harmless. To my delight, baring a nasty iron deficiency that can make kiddos crave dirt (I don't think we are there yet) it is just another one of those 'usually nothing to worry about' toddler experimentations we parents must endure. Funny thing is, watching Baby Boy eat dirt made me realize that as much as I know our world is going to continue to change and technology will evolve, I'm certain as certain could be that a thousand years from now boys will still eat dirt and moms will still wonder, "is this really normal?". 
On a side note, if I haven't officially overcome my germ phobia yet then I can share with you that I am darn close. There is nothing like a little boy to help you work through that fear and much to my dismay, apparently dirt is not a boy's kryptonite. Boy oh boy oh boy.
Fabulous writing! So true, and so well written.
ReplyDeleteWow! Nice post, my dear! I wonder how many calories dirt has....
ReplyDelete