The Kids Becoming One with the Hotel Germs—>
I may be closer to becoming a grown-up.
I’ve long been convinced that I have the soul of a seventeen-year-old. I don’t mean I haven’t matured since I was seventeen. I hope I have. I was a mess at seventeen. No, most things I enjoy are for someone seventeen-years-old. My favorite foods are salty and cheesy and junk food. My favorite books are YA. I never watch TV, but if I did, it would be some reality show geared toward teens.
Understand my dilemma–not watching 24 or craving organic yogurt makes me feel out-of-place with my peers. But this weekend, I grew up a little bit. I finally understood a phenomenon that had baffled me.
Hotel Carpets.
I’m not paranoid and have trouble dedicating long hours to the “germ nightmares” of the other moms in carpool line. This isn’t a good thing. I wish I could be more of a germophobe. My kids have constant colds, they’d obviously do well with a little more time at the bathroom sink. But I just can’t get into it. Clutter, I hate. Germs? I don’t really have energy for the war against them. I’ve heard more than one mom talk about carrying Lysol with her to a hotel room and spraying everything from the toilet to the top of the TV before she’d let her darlings touch a thing.
Why? Every time I’ve stayed in a hotel, the maid barges in to clean it for a good three or four hours, usually when I need to shower or nap or change clothes. Clearly the room is cleaner than our own home.
We spent this weekend in Galveston at the Moody Gardens Hotel. It was our first time in a hotel when all the kids were old enough to not be placed directly into their Pack-N-Plays to sleep. The twins are potty-training, which means, of course, lots of time with their little bottoms and other parts uncovered. I had barely set down my suitcase and reached for a brush to comb some of the Galveston humidity from my hair when Ellie took off her Pull-Up and ran to try her luck at the new hotel potty. Fine. We have three kids five and under, clearly they’ll have to use public potties. It was after she finished we had the trouble. I handed her a fresh Pull-Up and instructed her to put it on. Her method includes sitting on the floor and scooting across the carpet on her bottom, sort of wriggling into it.
At that moment, when I began shrieking about germs and STDs and athlete’s food, I felt like a real grown-up.
Too bad I don’t carry any of that portable Lysol.
