Waueughhhhhhh

Bet you thought the title of this post was a toddler quote.  Nope.   It was me.  Yesterday G did the first thing of her life that really grossed me out.  Given that for all of her life so far she’s been a baby and a toddler, I think I can boast that I’m not that easily grossed out.

She is getting more and more autonomous and opinionated and able, and this is making life lively and challenging.  She’s also waking up earlier from her afternoon naps, which, in conjunction with the milder weather, and the later sundown, means we have a chance to do something outside before her suppertime.

Yesterday we were in the conservatory fixing a bike, and I was reminded, by not being able to move without bumping into something, we have too many objects in there.  One of these objects is a Graco Quattro stroller/buggy/”travel system”/thing, which is huge and which we haven’t used in months (kind of like the conservatory).  It was great, with the carrycot, when G was too small to sit up.  We used a lighter one when it became practical, and for various reasons, over time, we’ve fallen out of the habit of using a stroller at all.

This point was illuminated the other day, when I gave G a ride around the yard in the smaller stroller and she said “wheeee!”  Yesterday she recognized the Graco as another rolling chair and insisted on a ride in that too.  It really looks nice and cushy for a toddler, actually, and she was reluctant to get out.  She kept closing the snack tray in front of her every time I swung it up to take her out.

It was all fun and games up until that point.

Brrrr.  I’m still getting the heebie-jeebies thinking about this.

I got G out of the buggy so I could take photos of it, in the hopes of selling it and regaining a large footprint of floorspace.  G puttered around gathering rocks and snail shells.

Finished with my photo session, I rolled the buggy back in next to where she sat, absorbed in probing around with a finger in one of her snail shells.

Then I noticed it wasn’t.  Just.  A shell.

What happened next is hopefully not that I’ve just given G an irrational aversion to the sight or feel of squished invertebrates.  Because I have that irrational aversion and it’s not very useful.  I asked her rather sternly to put the snail down.  I struggled ridiculously to get that thing out of her hands without touching anything goopy (i.e. anything relevant) myself.  She tried valiantly to evade my hands and manage one more squish.  It is only amusing in retrospect.

I took the thing away, and then I washed her hands.  A lot.  And I think I probably said “eeeewwww” more than a level-headed parent would deem wise.  As it turns out, snail guts are kind of sticky.  Ordinary soap didn’t get the greenish chunks off, but Reinol scrubby soap did.  G seemed bemused by the extra-thorough handwashing and stayed fairly chirpy throughout the process.  She may have come through it unscathed.

When I showed F my pictures from the afternoon, he thought G looked pretty comfy in that big buggy and suggested we take her out in it this weekend.  Looks as though we may be rationalizing some procrastination on decluttering the conservatory.  It’s just as well I’d had that “duh” moment during my little photo shoot when I remembered one of the reasons we bought that model in the first place: it folds up really small!