I was out walking with my 4-year-old daughter, the radiant center of my universe and the reason my hair is migrating from my scalp to my back. It was a beautiful Sunday morning—birds chirping, dogs barking, and one random guy jogging in neon spandex like he’d lost a bet. We were headed to the park, hand in tiny hand, when it happened.
She picked up something off the ground.
Something unidentifiable. It could’ve been a raisin, a rock, a fossilized gumdrop, or a portal to another dimension. But as any parent knows, kids see anything smaller than a tennis ball and assume it’s an hors d’oeuvre. Without hesitation, she started raising it to her mouth.
Naturally, I did what every parent with at least one functioning neuron would do: I dove.
I didn’t just reach. I launched. Mid-air interception, Olympic dad level. I snatched the mysterious object from her hand with all the drama of a slow-motion movie scene. Somewhere in the distance, an eagle screamed in approval.
She looked up at me, wide-eyed, betrayed.
“Daddy!” she yelled. “I was tasting that!”
“TASTING?” I said, clutching the object like it might bite me. “Honey, you don’t taste things from the sidewalk!”
“Why not?” she said, with a pout that could melt the Arctic.
“Because,” I replied, stalling for a reason that didn’t involve describing pathogens, bacteria, and things even hand sanitizer gives up on, “it’s not clean. There are germs. Dirt. Tiny microbes having a rave party.”
“Can I go to the party?” she asked.
“No, sweetie. The germs didn’t invite you. They just want to make you puke sparkles and ruin my week.”
She frowned. “But I like sparkles.”
And that’s when I realized I was negotiating with someone who once tried to befriend a squirrel by offering it a cracker from her nose.
Now, this should’ve ended there. But it didn’t.
Because as we kept walking, she decided she needed answers.
“Daddy,” she asked after a few quiet steps, “how come YOU get to eat weird stuff?”
“What weird stuff?”
“Like that blue cheese. And olives. And that thing from the fridge that smelled like a foot.”
“That was brie. It’s fancy cheese.”
“It smelled like a fancy foot.”
Touché.
“And,” she added, “last week you dropped a jellybean and still ate it.”
“That was a five-second rule situation!”
She looked up at me, eyebrow raised, judging me with the intensity of a tiny philosopher with nothing to lose.
“So, when I eat something off the ground, it’s gross, but you do it and it’s science?”
“It’s called being an adult. We have immunity. And…taxes.”
She blinked. “What are taxes?”
“Something you’ll understand when you’re older and bitter.”
She nodded solemnly, as if she already knew she was destined to one day question every paycheck.
But her mission wasn’t over. She started listing every questionable thing I’d ever eaten. Cold pizza from the counter. A doughnut I found in my car’s cup holder (I maintain it was less than a day old). A questionable sushi roll from a gas station (I was hungry, don’t judge me). She remembered it all. Like a tiny forensic accountant, cross-examining me in a court of moral hygiene.
“Remember the hot dog you dropped at the barbecue?”
“That was different.”
“You brushed it off on your jeans!”
“Those were clean jeans.”
“They had ketchup on them from earlier!”
“THE KETCHUP WAS ALREADY PART OF THE HOT DOG!”
People were starting to stare. I was in the middle of the sidewalk arguing about the sanitation ethics of condiments with someone wearing a unicorn backpack and light-up sneakers.
At that point, I had to switch tactics.
“Sweetheart,” I said, crouching down to her level, “sometimes things on the ground are dangerous. They could make you very sick. And if you get sick, you’ll have to go to the doctor.”
“I like the doctor,” she replied smugly.
“Even when they give shots?”
Her eyes widened like I’d just summoned the Boogeyman with a stethoscope.
“No,” she whispered.
“Exactly.”
That should’ve been checkmate. But instead, she narrowed her eyes, crossed her arms, and dropped this gem:
“Well, maybe you need a shot… for being a hypocrite.”
I stared at her. She stared back. We were in a standoff. Somewhere in the distance, a tumbleweed rolled through Manhattan.
And then she broke the silence by singing her “Germs Are Friends” song, which she apparently learned at preschool. I don’t know who’s running that curriculum, but they need to have a long, hard look at their choices.
She twirled as she sang, flinging imaginary bacteria into the air like Disney glitter:
“Germs are friends that you can’t see,
Living on stuff and you and me!
They party all day and they play in your nose,
Sometimes they give you the squirty throws!”
Squirty. Throws.
And that was it. I laughed so hard I had to sit on a bench, gasping for breath while she sang about viruses doing conga lines in your colon.
An elderly couple walked past and nodded at me.
“She’s got good material,” the man said. “You should take her on tour.”
We made it to the park eventually. She promised (with fingers crossed behind her back) not to eat any more “sidewalk snacks.” I kept a close eye on her, though I’m convinced she still tried to lick a rock when I was distracted by a bee.
And that’s parenthood in a nutshell.
You start the day trying to protect your kid from bacteria and end it being called a hypocrite by a 4-year-old with sticky fingers and a song about diarrhea.
But hey, at least she didn’t lick a pigeon again.
This time.
