Life's a Dirty Beach

Kids are gross. They're sticky, icky, nasty little things. And I'm not even going to go into the pees and the poops and the vomit because as a mommy blogger, I am entitled to devote entire columns to each of those bodily fluids individually. I'm simply talking about the perpetual motion towards stickiness that begins the moment they step out of a bath.

I think I tend toward the laid back side of these types of things (pause for a moment while all my family, friends and the UPS man nod their heads), and even I am surprised at the amount of time I spend each day recoiling as I unstick bodies from objects, clothing from bodies, and body parts from other body parts.

I mean, I can go a day or two without a shower myself quite happily but these kids don't even have the decency to hide their filth. They wear it like a film of honor. I sometimes wish they made "dry body shampoo" for children. Oh wait, they do, they're called baby wipes and I am always wells stocked (thanks, Costco!)

This time of year is the worst—you get the added bonus of the nasal faucet that runs endlessly, producing a supply of snot that serves as both a source of native ick in its own right but also as the perfect medium to attract and trap ick from the world at large. You could seriously preserve some fossils in that sap.

It's a sad fact too that the world's most active mucous membranes belong to the people who can't even figure out how to blow their own noses. I've completely given up on that charade: "Here, blow." Confused look, slight intake of breath. Pathetic and maddening.

Mr. R, and this will be a shocker, has a low tolerance for the ickies. At this point I almost feel bad for him when we have spaghetti for dinner. Forget ice cream cones. Alice sneezed directly into the pancake batter yesterday and I think he blacked out.

I generally subscribe to what I like to call the "life's a beach" approach. If you go to the beach worried about every grain of sand touching every part of you, you'll never enjoy your time at the beach. And you can't avoid the sand anyway, no matter what you do. It's best to just think of the sand as a natural, harmless loofah and comfort yourself with the fact that you can wash it off at the end of the day.

Incidentally, you should see me and the kids as we leave a beach—let's just say every nook and cranny is exfoliated and Mr. R usually acts like he doesn't know us.

Where was I? Oh yes, all those bits of dirt and microbes are just grains of sand asking to live in harmony with us, the creatures of this earth. Om. Crunch.

This hoovy groovy metaphor was deeply tested on our last plane trip. Hazel has an adorable, soft, super clingy blanket that serves as her lovie. Soon after we arrived at the airport, she made it her job to drag it over every available floor and surface of JFK, as we walked, powerless with our hands full, toward the security line.

Just when I was reaching my limit in terms of judgmental looks from strangers, she took that blanket, wrapped it firmly around her head and body, dropped to the floor and rolled toward the ID screening. Perhaps she was reenacting a fire safety video? But in reality she resembled a human lint brush, as that blanket proved to be the perfect material for gathering each and every bit of unthinkable debris off the ground of one of the world's busiest airports.

Onlookers audibly moaned.

But hey, we only had about eight hours ahead of us in our journey until she and that blanket could be properly cleaned. Any thoughts of separating her from her makeshift dishrag were put to rest when the TSA insisted it go through the x-ray machine. She was profoundly pissed off for the 45 seconds it spent bunched up on the belt. (At that point the use of one of their buckets would have been an insult to the buckets). But I don't really blame security—that blanket was terrorizing.

When they were finally reunited, she smothered her face into "blankie" the way one would rub their wet face with a clean towel fresh from the drier. Then she sneezed on it.

Just another day at the (highly polluted, grossly contaminated, on the NRDC watch list) beach.