Fear factor

Based on the title, you may be thinking that we broke down to enjoy Fear Factor as a family.  Wrong.   We did not. Even the Daniels have not been watching that silly show.  If we were going to cheat, not that I am saying we are going to, but if we were going to cheat it would be for something really good like Ellen, Wheel of Fortune or Criminal Minds not for a stupid show based on exploiting people's greatest fears.

I recently found myself scraping old dried out vomit off from the back seat of our van and I thought to myself, “now this is pretty gross; it’s down right disgusting.”  But I didn’t flinch, gag or dry heave not even a little.  I just did what needed to be done and went about the rest of the evening as if nothing had happened.  I am not afraid of such disgusting things.

In my mind such issues are really not a big deal at all.  They are just part of life.  I had years of training on dealing with gross things back when I ran the Animal Shelter.  Prior to that, I once had an entire fifty pound bag of moldy dog food in the leaky trunk of my car that Miranda and I had to handle.  I am pretty much an expert in dealing with disgusting stuff.  Miranda is as well.  She really man handled that moldy dog food single handedly I was more of a spectator.  Her son has apparently inherited her talents as he recently swept her floor and snacked on the week old mini marshmallow that he found during the process. 

In the past two weeks I have had two separate incidents of puking children in the back of our van which thankfully is a record and still I was not afraid of the germs nor grossed out by cleaning the old vomit that had somehow been missed during the preliminary cleaning.  

Mysophobia is a pathological fear of contamination and germs; it is your basic garden variety germophobe.  I for one am not afraid of germs.  I eat ‘em for lunch!  I eat food that has landed on the floor even after five seconds has passed by and so do my kids.  I have probably eaten more dirt and bugs than your average Survivor contestant, I don’t wash my hands excessively nor do I carry a bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse and I am the mother of 3 young children.  The only instance I can recall fearing germs was during the first puking episode in our van a few weeks ago and I was only afraid then because the marathon I had trained long and hard for was less than 48 hours away when the puke contaminated our van.  You all read about that in a prior post and by the way not yelling at the kids is actually going pretty well.  That’s not to say I haven’t yelled at all, but I do notice a significant reduction in my outbursts.  Anyhow, I really didn’t want to miss running the marathon.  Any other day of the year, the puked covered van wouldn’t have even fazed me, but at that moment in time the puke scared me senseless. 

My kids often have dirty hands and faces and I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing.  They are kids after all.  I just don’t understand all of the fuss over germs.  Nowadays you can’t go anywhere without seeing antibacterial soap and sanitizer readily available.  Germs are found literally everywhere and for the most part they don’t cause too many problems.  We have been coexisting with microorganisms for millions of years and other than the plague and a few other significant epidemics, I think we can all agree that it has worked out pretty well for us humans. 

“Why is this relevant to NOTV2011?” Is probably what you are thinking right now and I will tell you why.   It is relevant because Miranda and I, while unafraid of germs, were completely terrified of no television for a year while raising our respective young children.  We were scared @#&!less. And while she has not exactly made it the full year without television whatsoever, she did live at least half without TV and the rest with a significant reduction in television time and I have for the most part lived the better part of a year without television.  We are no longer afraid of entertaining our children without the assistance of our television sets and we are still not germophobes either.     

Vern and Mird Out