I am a very particular, neat person.  I don’t like when my stuff is dirty.  I don’t like when my stuff is messy.  I don’t like when my stuff is not the perfect way that I want and expect it to be.  I think I have a mild case of OCD that I have learned to deal with over the years.  It is one of my many personality flaws.  As my child has grown, I am really struggling with this particular personality flaw of mine.  A grimy, germy toddler running around is very difficult for someone like me. When my daughter was a newborn, my house, my things, her things, pretty much everything had to be neat, clean, and 100% sanitized.  How things have changed in the last eighteen months.

I now tolerate many disgusting things.  The key word here is “tolerate.”  I don’t like the mess that is my house, person, or life and I wish that I could be more “put-together,” but until I win the lottery jackpot and I’m able to hire a personal assistant, maid, and chef, I am going to have to deal with just getting by (mess and all).

So here are the ten most disgusting things that I have learned to tolerate since having a child:

1.    Spit up/food on me/her.  Babies spit up a lot and it gets on whatever person happens to be holding her.  As babies grow, they become messy little eaters.  Unless you want to change her clothes and your clothes eight times a day (which means even more laundry), you learn to live with crusty spit up or peanut butter on your suit.  Wipe it off and move on with your day.

2.    Snot/boogers on me/her.  My shirt has become my daughter’s tissue.  She always has snot on her face, so every time she hugs me or I pick her up, I get snot on my shoulder.  It has gotten to the point where I just use my sleeve to wipe snot off of her face.  I figure that my shirt is already covered in mucus, so what difference a little bit more?

3.    Poop/pee on me/her.  I remove my daughter’s diaper and that’s when she decides to pee.  When I remove her diaper after a poop explosion, she kicks her foot in it.  Diapers leak all over car seats, cribs, chairs, or the floor.  I initially gagged and ran to the bathroom to wash everything.  Now I just grab a disinfectant wipe and wipe it all down.

4.    My daughter puts stuff on the floor into her mouth.  I used to wash every utensil, pacifier, or toy that my daughter threw on the floor.  After watching her take clumps of dog hair and shove them into her mouth, I figure that she really doesn’t care that her spoon fell on the floor and neither should I.

5.    My daughter’s saliva gets in my mouth.  I used to get grossed out when I watched other moms put their child’s utensils in their mouths after their kid ate off of it.  Now I do it myself.

6.    My daughter shares food with the dogs.  I tried to keep the dogs out of the kitchen once the baby was born.  They are smart and quickly realized who would give them table food.  Since my daughter is constantly handing them food from her plate, I can’t keep them away.  She gives them a bite and then she takes a bite.  They lick food off of her hands and then she puts her hands in her mouth.  It’s just gross, but there is nothing I can do about it.  Once again, she doesn’t care that it’s gross, so neither should I.

7.    My daughter plays on the dog bed.  My dogs are foul.  They eat cat poop out of the litter box and they roll in deer poop.  Then they come back to their bed in the living room.  My daughter also likes to hang out on this nasty bed. I bought her two different types of chairs, but she still prefers rolling around on the dog bed with the dogs.

8.    Animal hair on everything.  I have two dogs and two cats.  There are also three humans running around the house.  There is hair everywhere on everything.

9.    Daycare germs.  My daughter started daycare when she was twelve weeks old.  When she came home that first day, I wiped her down.  That was a pointless waste of my time.  She got sick within the first two weeks.  I caught her cold a few days later.  Then I caught her next cold, her flu, her stomach bug, and the next three colds after that.  I was sick from October through April.  The good news is that my daughter and I have built up immunities to daycare germs, and this year, neither of us are sick…yet.

10.    A house that is not as clean/disinfected as I would like it to be.  With all the traffic in my house, it gets nasty really fast. I have four shedding, barfing, peeing, garbage eating animals, one destructive toddler, and one messy husband.  I vacuum daily.  I do at least a load of laundry every day.  I wash dishes daily.  I try to wipe down my bathrooms, dust, clean the litter, and mop the floor when I get a spare minute on the weekend.    I told myself that the house is clean, but then I made the mistake of looking closely at the caulk on my shower door seam and noticed that it had developed an active mold culture.  This is something that I would expect in a college frat house, not my home.  I grabbed the bleach, killed that mold, and went back to telling myself that my house is clean.

• Sigh. I continue to lower my expectations.