My child has just run past me with his mouth smeared with the remains of a strawberry Solero ice cream and I didn’t even flinch.
… and he stayed like that till bath time.
There was a time when I would look at the parents of children with messy faces and recoil. I would wonder why parents chose to be so neglectful of their children and not wipe their faces clean of chocolate, tomato sauce, biscuit crumbs … and the worst of all: snot.
They seemed to just not care.
In the early days I would wipe even a shadow of a crumb from his top lip and he never had hands dirty enough to transfer onto anything cleaner in his reach. Have I become more neglectful? Lazy even? Maybe I just have to admit that dirt it not only ok, but essential for a four-year-old to function properly.