Cover your mouth when you do that. In fact, cover everything.

Today I discovered that, like a miracle, overnight, new sensor-flush toilets were installed in my office building. I am REALLY excited about this.

I've never been a major germaphobe. I am generally of the opinion that while you shouldn't go around licking other people's keyboards, nor should you get all Howard Hughes about avoiding germs.

But with all this H1N1 craziness, only some of which I am not convinced is a government conspiracy - although why the government wants us to get the flu is not altogether clear just yet - I can't help but become a lot more diligent. After all, I have a baby at home, a baby who is in the High Risk category. I don't care if I get sick, but I cannot let her be exposed to this. So that's why not having to touch the toilet to flush it is so important to me. That and because I've never liked having to touch anything in a public restroom. A restroom with an automated door, automated stall lock, automated ass-wiper, automated flushing toilet, automated stall unlock, automated water faucet, automatic soap dispenser and automated paper towel dispenser would completely bliss me out.

Anyway my point is, I don't want to touch anything right now, because I haven't been able to get my baby vaccinated, and not touching things is the only other thing I know to do to keep her safe. Why hasn't she been vaccinated? Well, because like everybody else except people who work for big important banks whose status has, unaccountably, warranted more doses of the vaccine than hospitals, I can't find the stuff anywhere. Not that I've decided she should definitely get the vaccine, because the waters are further muddied by the controversy surrounding additives found in the H1N1 that are not in the more generally-accepted regular old flu vaccine that we all know and love. Apparently the vaccine could either completely paralyze you, or give you autism or, if you're lucky, prevent you from dying. If you listen to the dissenters, it's kind of a crap shoot which outcome you'll get. Who do you trust?

I could live with my daughter having autism; I could not live with her being dead. So I guess if someday, likely after this thing has completely run its course, someone offers me the vaccine for her I'll take it. But so far the closest we've gotten is our doctor's nurse telling us they finally received five - just five - baby vaccines and would we like one? We said yes, but then she recanted, because apparently there is a Higher High Risk category to which our daughter does not belong. I felt simultaneously as if I'd dodged a bullet and signed my daughter's death warrant.

There's a possibility that after both my fans (hi Mom) read this, you will be driven for perhaps the first time to comment on my blog because this is such a heated issue. But I beg you: please don't. If I read anymore opinions, or even, dare I say it, facts, about this situation my head will implode. Which is arguably worse than autism, but would at least negate my need for an H1N1 vaccine.

A Few Thoughts On...

Toys

At first, there was one specific place for them. A cute little basket, tucked away unobtrusively on a shelf. But slowly the toys started to migrate. A few in the bathroom for bath time. A few in the kitchen for meal time. A few in the living room so we didn't have to run up and down the stairs. A few in our bedroom - nobody seems to know how those got there.

A baby requires 24-7 entertainment. An unreasonably small portion of that entertainment is provided by sleeping. The rest is up to us. A single toy carries an interest factor of approximately 3.2 minutes. There are some toys that can be used more than once in a day, but only if it's been several hours since the first time, and you must be prepared for the fact that the interest factor for the second use is reduced to about 2 minutes. Also, there are always one or two toys that, for some inexplicable reason, cause the child to scream in terror when they are produced. (In our case, a friendly-looking stuffed ice cream cone that makes a jingling noise when you shake it.) Of course, there's no way to know which of the toys will be that kind until you've already purchased, unpackaged and thoroughly scrubbed down the toy so that it can be safely presented to the child. Accounting for these oddities, plus the few toys that are, let's face it, really more for you (the baby isn't going to be much interested in a lego Starship Fighter for quite some time, if ever), and based on 720 minutes in a day, with an average interest-level time of 3 minutes per toy, I calculate that to entertain a 10-month-old baby, you need about 275 toys. Glancing around the living room right now, that seems about right.

Fashion

Shopping for a baby is far less depressing than shopping for oneself on several levels. Even if an outfit is a size too small and covered in regurgitated peas they can still pull it off. Also, I can easily find adorable outfits for my daughter that cost ten dollars. She never complains that her ass looks too big in something - after all, it's mostly diaper, and she knows this.

There's really only one drawback to shopping for an infant: the guilt trip. It is incredibly easy to make a parent feel guilty. In fact, you don't need to try. Chances are they feel guilty already. This summer I was shopping for my daughter at Osh Kosh B'Gosh where I was delighted to have found these delicious teeny little t-shirts embroidered with flowers for only five dollars each. Score! But when the cashier was ringing me up she asked, "Do you have enough shorts to go with these?"

I would have thought zero would be enough shorts for someone who is twenty-six inches long, but apparently I am the WORLD'S WORST MOTHER because I had NO shorts. Only shirts. What did I think my daughter was - Donald Duck, going around wearing only tops and no bottoms? Who allowed me to procreate anyway? "I-I, uh, wanted to wait and see how many I, er, already have at home," I stuttered lamely. The cashier shot me a withering look that said she saw right through me and, as soon as I was out of earshot, she'd be calling social services.

But guilt trip or no, I really have no choice but to shop constantly for my daughter. She outgrows stuff so fast she's like the Incredible Hulk. I put her down for a nap in a neat little outfit only to find her an hour later half naked with the ragged tatters of her clothing hanging off her limbs. Which brings me to my next thought:

Size

My daughter is 10 months old, and fast outgrowing 18 month sizes. According to the doctor she is in the 99th percentile for height and weight. But I don't think she's the freak the sadists who draw up these charts would like me to believe. Because when I started asking around, it turned out that ALL the babies are in the 90-something percentile. Now, I'm no statistician, but isn't that, like, impossible? Seems to me we need some new charts. I'm guessing these are the charts used in 1886, when people were all generally no more than 4 feet tall and had waists 13 inches around, roughly the size of my dog's. Meanwhile the clothing manufacturers are blindly and faithfully following these charts and creating minuscule socks that wouldn't have fit my daughter when she was a four-month fetus. But that's okay; I can use them as finger warmers. She can totally pull that off.