"I think it's good for kids
to get germy and dirty, and that's how they build their immune systems. You
can't be too overprotective. They have to be out there in the world."
This is what Gwyneth Paltrow advised in response to Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement.
But it’s not an original idea.
All mothers who quickly realised that maintaining an anti-dirt stance is a fast
track to crazy, have embraced the idea that God made dirt so dirt don’t hurt.
(That’s also not an
original, my mother-in-law owns that one).
We live on the second floor
of a house and share the washing-line with the downstairs landlord.
All fine
and fabulous except the yard in the winter is always damp. Obviously I can’t
leave Q to her own devices while I hang out the stupid amount of laundry we seem
to accumulate, so down she comes and I sit her on a big garbage bag.
Ghetto I
know, but I refuse to wash a quilt each day because it gets covered in dirt.
Problem is, she doesn’t
stay on the bag and very quickly finds the muddiest part of the garden and
stuffs some in her mouth.
Nutritional value of mud is
quite low I’d imagine, so our landlord is trying to train her to eat the asthma
weed that’s slowly taking over the garden instead.
We went to a picnic last
Saturday and there was another baby girl there who showed Q up so devastatingly
I ended up fleeing in embarrassment.
This girl was dressed in
pristine pink and white striped linen – linen for heaven’s sake.
Who (apart from mothers on the lower north shore) even
wears linen?
Worse than that, there
wasn’t a mark on it.
Q meanwhile, had gotten
into the strawberries and looked like a little vampire with red juice covering
her once clean top. She – of course – had to be deterred from eating more
leaves, knocked over a beer, chewed on a young girl’s play wand and tried to
climb on top of another guest’s dog.
Busy. Interested.
Energetic. Lively.
Yep, those are all words I
heard describing my little human that day.
An anti-dirt stance? Not a
chance.
But as a fairy searching for middle earth, what else would you expect?
