Cereal For Breakfast

Today, Jensen was eating his Cheerios without the benefit of milk. Or a spoon. At some point, the Cheerios ended up on the filthy linoleum. Ordinarily I wouldn’t think twice about letting him eat off of the floor. We have not a “5 second rule”, but a “if it’s not covered in hair and ants it’s okay to eat” rule that we ordinarily implement.

Remember, this is the third child.

During the first two years of our oldest child’s life, if “it” fell to the floor, “it” would have to be boiled for two minutes before she could put “it” in her mouth. Whatever “it” was. After Cailey was born, all bets of a sanitary nature were suspended. By the third child, well, he’s lucky he’s not eating out of a dog dish. And if we had a dog, he’d be sharing.

But today, my floors are in such sad shape that even I had to shoo Jensen away from the fallen Cheerios. So, that should give you a really good idea what my floors have endured. Mostly they were wet and sticky from an unfortunate coffee accident. Quickly I pulled out my “Shark” vacuum and deftly sucked up the offending fallen Cheerios. I placed “Shark” by the kitchen trash, intending to empty it immediately. I turned my back for an instant, and Jensen turned the vacuum over and began pulling cereal out that had gotten lodged in the brushes on the underside of the vacuum. And before I could throw myself on him to stop him, yes, he ate the cereal.

I scooted him away from the trash so I could empty the vacuum. He watched from across the room. I could feel his bright blue eyes on me. Waiting. As soon as I was exiting the kitchen, he raced over to the kitchen trash, flung open the lid, thrust his chubby fist in and picked out a handful of Cheerios, and stuffed them in his mouth. These were the same Cheerios that had been thrown to the dirty ground, then sucked up by the vacuum, and unceremoniously dumped into the full kitchen garbage canister. The one that hasn’t been emptied for two days. At least.

You may want to note that there was a bowl of perfectly good clean Cheerios 5 feet away from him.

I stifled a scream as I again raced to extract the Cheerios from his mouth. Too late. But luckily I was able to help him remove a few wayward hairs from his teeth.

Nothing like finding undigested hair in your child’s diaper later.

I’ve noticed that my gross-out threshold is higher now that I’ve added a boy to the mix.

Goodness knows his behavior should never come as a complete surprise to me. Considering his roots. I’ve written ad nauseum about my dumpster diving in order to retrieve desired fare in this post, and this one. Well, and there was this one as well.

So in retrospect, I shrug my shoulders and proudly admit, “That’s my boy!”