Guest Post from Erika: A Cautionary Tale

This is a post about being smug and hubris and, well, you know where that leads. Peter and I, now on Week 3 of the "Is it Swine Flu?" Sniffles (but finally getting better, thank you very much), were having a lovely rainy Monday morning. It started off a bit rough, with Martin getting paged at a rather too early hour and handing off the baby to a still very much asleep Me. It wouldn't have been so bad, but my dear friend Lora's 40th birthday party was last night and I chose the Manhattan when I should have chosen the ice water, if you know what I mean. (House-made brandied cherries! Couldn't pass it up!)

I rallied, made it through TWO poopy diapers with a smile on my face, and, struck by a Martha Stewart moment, decided to make parmesan pea ravioli. (After washing my hands very thoroughly, of course.) This is where the smug part comes in. After a very amusing pea shelling session with Peter, in which peas made it into every corner of the playroom, we moved into the kitchen to make the ravioli filling.

Now, for those of you who have not visited our house, we have gone about child-proofing in the following way. We picked two rooms in which Peter is free to roam, child-proofed the heck out of them, and then did a sort of cursory job at making the rest of the house generally safe under adult supervision. If Peter is in either the kitchen or the playroom, we breathe a sigh of relief and let him roam freely because it really is difficult (not impossible!) for him to get into too much trouble in those rooms.

Back to the ravioli. I chopped, grated, and pureed as Peter wandered around the kitchen playing with this or that. At one point he sat down next to the back door and became engrossed in...something. I didn't pay too much attention because the kid can spend 30 minutes completely absorbed in taking things in and out of a plastic bowl.

I was feeling smug about my son's ability to amuse himself, about making ravioli from scratch, about keeping him indoors and safe from swine flu and all of the other dangers of the outside world. Then he screamed. That got my attention. I ran over to find the source of his sudden agony, and found...a BEE crawling on the kitchen floor. Peter was stung by a bee in our own darn kitchen!!!

The next 5 minutes happened really fast. I found the stinger in his tiny index finger, scraped it out with my driver's license, and Googled (sorry Martin) "bee sting treatment" as fast as I could with my free hand while Peter wailed. I tried to ice his poor throbbing finger, but he was having none of that. I escorted the poor dying bee unceremoniously out the back door. Then I waited for anaphylactic shock to set in. When it didn't, I was extremely relieved. And then, he was fine. He went back to singing to himself and pushing his high chair around the kitchen. Literally 5 minutes later.

Poor Peter. Poor bee! And poor me. I can't even protect my son from hurt and danger when he is right under my nose in my own kitchen. At least we know now that he is not allergic to bees.

On another note, I had a conversation with a very dear friend today that continues to bother me. He is planning a gathering at his house, and was concerned about mixing friends who have kids with "non-kid-positive" friends. Wait a minute. People who don't like children? What does that mean?

I completely understand not wanting your own children, or disliking badly behaved children, or finding people who talk incessantly about their children awfully boring, but not liking *children*? Who doesn't like children??? And this is the THIRD time this week that I have heard something about the animosity in the Mission between childless hipsters and older ex-hipsters who got married and had babies, battling for territory in some popular Mission district restaurant/coffee shop.

But back to those people who profess not to like children. I have seen even the most grizzly stoic people become utterly charmed by a beautiful, innocent child. I walk down the street with Peter and every single block he inspires smiles in strangers (apparently, only as long as I am not pushing a stroller into their favorite crowded gourmet coffee shop). Children are a light in this world. They are pure, unbridled joy. They are our only hope for the future. How can anyone not like children? I just don't understand. All you child haters out there, please enlighten me. Has my brain gone soft since spawning my own precious Mini-Martin?