Are you going to eat that? Part 2

Bill Cosby was right when he declared that all kids have brain damage. Why else would my two-year-old son behave the way he does? He will sit at the table with a plate of scrambled eggs and resolve not to eat them. He will sit there for hours, half starved, while the circles underneath his eyes grow darker and darker from hunger, and yet he will still persist in his refusal to eat the fluffy yellow eggs. This we call stubbornness. It is the fact that when released from his booster seat he thinks nothing of picking up dirt from the floor and putting that in his mouth: this we call brain damage. No, thank you, I don’t believe I’ll eat my eggs today, but if you can find me a nice fresh piece of cat litter I’ll just have that instead. YUCK! Of course, once something like that enters the mouth it is almost impossible to get it back out again. That fact, however, does nothing to discourage me from trying to retrieve the muck from my son’s mouth. So, at numerous times on any given day one can observe me doing just that. The command, “give that to mommy!” causes my toddler to look up at me from the top of his eyeballs and stick out his tongue. It amazes me that although he is quite adept at placing things into his mouth and taking out thing that are good for him, like peas, he has not yet mastered the technique of removing dirt from his mouth. So out comes the tongue which he proceeds to wipe on my outstretch palm in an effort to get rid of the offending non-food. To the untrained non-parenting eye I’m sure it just looks like I enjoy having my little boy lick my hand, but there is a difference between a lick and a tongue just resting on the hand after becoming immobilized by dirt-germs. This is usually about the time I decide that it would not be good for my son’s body to digest the ick so I put my slobbery hand into his mouth in hopes of being able to remove it myself. This works, at best, an average of two out of fifty-four times. About the same number of times I actually succeed in getting him to eat his eggs.