SALT LAKE CITY -- Pop quiz: You are at the grocery store pushing a cart with your child in the seat wandering down the cereal aisle when you glance down to see your little one’s lips suctioned to the cart handle. What do you do?

When my first born was fairly young, I would have panicked and quickly reached for my wipes to try and extract every filthy germ off his tongue. Then I would have sanitized his hands, the handle of the cart, and all surrounding areas for the second time. By this time baby is upset, mom is on edge and a small mishap is blown into a life-threatening catastrophe.

But now on child No. 2, and having had a bit more experience in the germ area, in this situation I would probably glance down and cringe a little, but then realize what’s done is done. Her mouth is already there, and sucking and slurping the handle bar is actually entertaining her, so I might as well let her keep going at it as long as it’s keeping her happy. I probably shouldn’t present this as a “would-have” scenario because it actually happened just a couple weeks ago.

As parents we find ourselves witnessing our children contracting germs in ways we never imagined we would. In the beginning we are rightfully disgusted, distraught and at a loss at how to thwart these dreaded instances. But over time we come to realize there just isn’t much we can do to prevent our kids from touching and tasting the nastiest of objects.

Take a look at a few classic examples from my experience:

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The ever attractive toilet bowl. With the intrigue of flushing water, a never ending roll of paper, and a big shiny white bowl, what’s for a child not to love (and want to put their mouths all over)? What parent hasn’t had to pry an insistent child away from splashing in and trying to drink water out of the household throne from time to time?

How about the fact that any edible dog-related item seems to be extremely tempting to young children? A few weekends ago we stayed with my in-laws who have a dog, and soon caught on that when we’d hear our daughter crunching on something she had visited the dog’s food bowl.

She also loved feeding the dog treats. We thought this was so cute until we caught on that she was actually feeding about every other one to herself. She now prefers dog jerky to any treat I can give her. All this sharing of food with the dog hadn’t gotten me too ruffled until I caught her bent over, slurping water out of the dog’s water bowl that I had seen the pooch drinking out of just moments before. That was where I drew the line.

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Getting away from the house is where things get even more interesting, like the occasional trip to McDonald's where in my experience this past week I should have bypassed ordering my daughter a McNuggets Happy Meal because she was much more “happy” gnawing on the end of the McDonald's table then eating her food.

Don’t even get me started on the indoor play places at fast food restaurants. When my kids enter those I’ve learned to let any knowledge of germs escape my brain or I might go insane watching them scamper around those disease traps, especially when witnessing them occasionally licking or sucking their hands, their primary contact to whatever unknown bacteria could be growing in those things.

Then there’s perhaps the scariest kind of germ contracting with kids: the kind we don’t always catch. In the case we offhandedly discover the deed after it’s happened, the old saying “ignorance is bliss” rings true. Like the time my son was chewing on something following a softball game of my husband’s. I asked him what he was chewing, to which he excitedly replied, “Somebody’s gum!”

The underside of some bleacher at that field was short one glob of ABC (already been chewed) gum that day.

As you can gather from the above examples, which are just the tip of the iceberg, witnessing (or should I say stomaching?) kids' inherent ability to acquire germs isn’t for the faint of heart. Unless we are willing to keep an eye on our children literally every nanosecond of every minute, it seems there isn’t much we can do to rule out dirty objects to dirty hands into our kids' mouths.

I’ve come to realize the best thing I can do is try and train myself to not get overly stressed about it, and carry a bottle of hand sanitizer on me at all times even if it’s only to make me feel better.

Lindsay Ferguson is a wife and a mother of two young children. She writes from home and keeps up a blog at www.lifeasamomuncut.blogspot.com.

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