Im THAT mom....

Im THAT mom, you know, the one that is a germ freak. The one that screens people before entering my house when they come to visit asking them of their last known sickness and what the symptoms were. I don’t usually go as far as taking their temperature before entering my home, but now that ebola is on the rise I might start making that mandatory. Speaking of ebola we will get to that in a different post, I have a whole story to write about my thoughts on that topic. Ok, where were we? Oh yes, germs. Im the mom that washes the pacifier every.single.time it falls out of the babies mouth. I know you are thinking “Aw this must be her first.” Wrong. This is my second baby and I might would argue that im worse with my second than I was with my first. It could be that im older and more knowledgeable or it could just be that im a nurse. I like to think im knowledgeable so we will go with that. I was looking through Landon’s baby book the other night reminiscing and apparently I took him to walmart when he was a week old, when I read that I judged myself. I was embarrassed and thought for a moment I was the worst mother EVER, then I reminded myself he is alive and healthy, but walmart? As soon as I walk into walmart I feel the germs crawling on me, I sanitize the buggy, no joke. Speaking of, here is a funny little story. I went to walmart yesterday, babyless, and I began wiping down my buggy. An older woman came in and was watching me with a look on her face that said “she is so strange”, after watching me for a couple of minutes she walked over to the wipes, grabbed a few and began wiping down HER buggy. I smiled and took off with my sanitized buggy while thinking I made a difference in one persons life today. I giggle at the moms that have hand made signs on their baby’s carseat that says “No touching please” or “Look don’t touch”. I must admit it’s a little sad that we even have to go as far as making a sign that says don’t touch my kid, but there is something about little baby’s that tend to make people want to grab their cute little hand or squeeze their precious little cheeks. While you are sitting there admiring my child and grabbing that cute little hand while talking to her in that ridiculous little voice (which im so guilty of… Landon once told my mother in law that Larson couldn’t understand her because she wasn’t talking in baby talk) all im thinking is thank you for passing on 1000 germs to my child who puts her hands in her mouth ALL the time. She now has germs circulating in her system that are building up viruses and/or bacteria in her very small, weakened immune system. But what do you say without offending someone? I don’t know either, that’s why I tend to steer clear of people when I have a newborn. Now before you go thinking im crazy, im definitely not to the point where I feel as if we should live in a bubble. Some germs are good and baby’s eventually need to be exposed to germs in order to build immunity. I’m a nurse and us nurses tend to have a lot of things in common when it comes to well just about everything, but as with anything there are some things that nurses do that most people wouldn’t understand. The nurse that says “My child has been running 104 fever for a week now, I guess I need to go ahead and take her to the doctor”, yeah that’s what I don’t understand. If my child is running 104 fever for more than a couple hours, im calling the doctor to schedule an appointment and by the time we get to the dr’s office I will be convinced that its meningitis or maybe even ebola because lets face it a high temperature isn’t normal. Its your bodies way of saying hey something isn’t right and im trying to work overtime to fix it. Nurses hold such a tremendous amount of knowledge that it’s scary, SCARY I tell ya. I make the joke often that being a nurse is a curse because it makes you look at the world differently. Obviously its not a curse, its actually one of the greatest blessings, but it does make you look at the world differently. Rashes are no longer just a rash and chigger bites are no longer just chigger bites. We think of a million and one other things that it could possibly be. Now with all that being said, I would like to point out that just because you take your newborn baby to walmart or don’t wash the pacifier every time its dropped or don’t screen people for sickness or don’t automatically take your child to the doctor for a fever, doesn’t make you a bad mom in my eyes. We all have our silly little quirks and mine just so happens to be that im extremely over protective of my children. I do know that God has a hand on my children and ultimately he is their greatest protector, but do you blame me for being over protective of such precious little beings?

 

Now excuse me while i go santize bottles and bleach the counter tops. :-)