Infection Control

Happy Fatherhood Friday!

I hope I didn't mislead you with the title - nobody at our house is puking, currently or recently.

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With 3 boys ages 2, 4, and 7, you can imagine that we have a lot of dirty fingers/feet/faces, pee dribbles on and around toilets, unflushed "presents", and a stinky Diaper Champ at our house.

And we do.

But we also have Little Brother.

Little Brother is our very own "reminderphile" (i.e., he LOVES to remind people about things.)

Seriously, he's better than your smart phone calendar, our "human siri" if you will (we don't have siri, so I'm just imagining here). Mom-E will specifically tell Little Brother things she doesn't want to forget, because his mind is like a steel trap.

And one of his favorite things to remind EVERYONE about is hygiene. He's definitely the infection control officer of our household.

While not a germaphobe, he's just got the picture that hygiene, particularly handwashing, is really important.

Whenever Big Brother comes out of the bathroom, Little Brother instantaneously blurts out, "Big Brother, did you flush? Did you use HANITIZER (our own word, short for hand sanitizer)?"

Every time. Even at 3am when both boys wake us up simultaneously to use the bathroom. I kid you not. The message is apparently hard-wired.

It also helps us narrow down the "suspect pool" (pun intended) when we find "presents" in the potty.

If Little Brother's hands get sticky from eating for even a few milliseconds, he's off to wash them, or at least ask for a wet wipe. (Napkins are apparently not good enough.)

He's gotten the same way about hanitizer. Most of the time, he's given it up in favor of good old-fashioned soap and water.

(It's quite a sight to walk into the bathroom to find his legs dangling in mid-air while he's holding on to the faucet with one hand and trying to get soap with the other.)

Once recently he handed something to Mom-E in the bathroom and despite not touching anything still asked, "Do I need to wash my hands?"

And because there's nothing like a good coincidence, Little Brother recently got a book as a kid's meal prize that's about Louis Pasteur and his work on the rabies vaccine.

You can imagine that generated a few thousand questions about "gray-bees" (as he calls them) and infections.

"Why that dog was foaming at the mouth? How did it get gray-bees? Where do gray-bees come from? What happens to people who get gray-bees?"

He started asking me about "gray-bees" before I even knew about the book. I though he was talking about some kind of weird colored honey.

Nonetheless, I'm thankful that Little Brother is so genuinely concerned about the health and welfare of his family.

Have a good weekend,
Flush and wash your hands,
Busy-Dad-E