I can't tell you how much valuable information I've gleaned simply from meeting and talking with other Mommas. Sometimes I'm buoyed by how much I know, and other times I'm horrified at, once again, being confronted with my subpar parenting skills. As I've discussed before, I am not the type of Mother who reads parenting books or spends time cruising chat boards discussing the merits of this or that type of parenting. I would like to be that Mother, but the reality is that I prefer to spend my evenings drinking excellent wine and watching Masterpiece Theater rather than reading about the newest parenting craze. As a result of my (selfish) choices, I often find that I'm not fulfilling some of my parental duties. Take, for instance, my discovery that I should've been brushing the Muffin Man's teeth; an issue we're still working on (four out of seven days isn't bad, right?).
Monday evening I attended a lovely get together with a group of Moms from my neighborhood. We discussed all sorts of topics, ranging from how to achieve balance (hahaha - impossible) to how long one can go away on vacation sans children before it becomes a problem. At some point in the evening one of the other Mommas posed a question relating to the fact that she washes her son's hands before mealtimes. Honestly, I have no recollection of what the question happened to be because I was so horrified by the fact that it never occurred to me to wash Noah's hands before sitting him down to eat. Every other Mommy in that room, save for myself and the Mommy of Noah's little girlfriend, washes their kids hands before meals. Heck, I haven't even been giving my son a cursory pat down with a baby wipe! I've just been sticking him in his high chair, putting bites of food in front of him, and letting him shovel them in with his filthy, germ-covered baby hands!!! G-d knows what kind of contagious diseases I've been unwittingly exposing my darling little man to simply because I'm such a clueless disaster of a Mother. I'm sure, thanks to my parenting incompetence, that my child has picked up some horrible disease that's going to haunt him for the rest of his life; remind me to make sure our medical insurance covers "contagious tropical diseases".
I'm eternally grateful to that Momma for highlighting yet another way in which I've been failing my son. I'm currently working on teaching him how to wash his hands in the sink, and I've even started carrying some all natural anti-bacterial wipes to use when we're dining out. I am determined to step up my Mothering game…just as long as I don't have to actually read parenting books to do so.
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