Ten Little Fingers, Ten Little Toes
Posted: March 19, 2017, 7:15 pm
Today we visited a neighbor with her new baby boy, freshly home after a week at Udon General. Although the girl came from a very low income family, she married into a family with a decent (although very Thai) home, with a new REVO and new tractor in the car port (two successful 2-month blueberry trips to Sweden).
While we were there, chickens tried to come in the open door, a bee buzzed over the mother and her baby, and there were a fair share of those tiny black buggaboos that seem to follow you wherever you go. Day old fish were drying near an open window with an assortment of flies helping out the process.
While we were yakking, the young mother fed her baby, the old-fashioned way.....so while I was keeping my eyes at the proper level, I got to thinking about how much clean is clean enough, and how much clean becomes too clean.
The baby isn't using pampers......cloth diapers that'll be washed in cold water. If'n'when the mother decides to feed by bottle, the bottles and nipples will be washed in cold water. The bee and chickens and black buggaboos would give most any American mother the heebie-jeebies about exposing her newborn to all sorts of toxicity. And yet, the baby here will most likely grow up to be healthy and strong.....like all the village kids who are raised in even less sterile conditions. They'll eat peanuts and probably not have allergies.
Meanwhile, back in the US recently, we were at a home where the mother prewashed dishes with a clorox-soap spray, then put them in the dishwasher with blazing hot water to kill every last possible germ. Her two kids have an assortment of allergies and the mother is considering a gluten free diet for them.
That's my moment of zen for the day. I didn't get an answer to my question, but I'm leaning in the less-clean-isn't-necessarily-such-a-bad-thing direction.
While we were there, chickens tried to come in the open door, a bee buzzed over the mother and her baby, and there were a fair share of those tiny black buggaboos that seem to follow you wherever you go. Day old fish were drying near an open window with an assortment of flies helping out the process.
While we were yakking, the young mother fed her baby, the old-fashioned way.....so while I was keeping my eyes at the proper level, I got to thinking about how much clean is clean enough, and how much clean becomes too clean.
The baby isn't using pampers......cloth diapers that'll be washed in cold water. If'n'when the mother decides to feed by bottle, the bottles and nipples will be washed in cold water. The bee and chickens and black buggaboos would give most any American mother the heebie-jeebies about exposing her newborn to all sorts of toxicity. And yet, the baby here will most likely grow up to be healthy and strong.....like all the village kids who are raised in even less sterile conditions. They'll eat peanuts and probably not have allergies.
Meanwhile, back in the US recently, we were at a home where the mother prewashed dishes with a clorox-soap spray, then put them in the dishwasher with blazing hot water to kill every last possible germ. Her two kids have an assortment of allergies and the mother is considering a gluten free diet for them.
That's my moment of zen for the day. I didn't get an answer to my question, but I'm leaning in the less-clean-isn't-necessarily-such-a-bad-thing direction.