"Think before you touch."

I'll be the first to admit that I've said some pretty ridiculous things in my time as a mother and given some strange advice disguised as gibberish, but I also know when I slip up and say something teetering on the edge of reason and I'll tell ya folks, this is one of those times. I mean, it's genius - it's simple and clear and downright easy to remember. We've all said or heard, at some point in our lives, things like, "Think before you speak," or "Think before you act," but I never thought it would be necessary, by any means, to tell someone that they should take a moment and contemplate whether or not their decision to put their fingers on something would be a wise or a foolish one. But, alas, I had given birth to a boy who would touch absolutely anything, no matter how fragile, sticky, heavy, or disgusting it might be. The proverbial last straw came when we were in the Bahamas. Yes I know, that was only about a month ago and said child just turned 10 so the speed with which this insight came would not win me any awards. But the magnitude of its influence on his future well-being far outweighs the speed with which it arrived. Or at least that's what I choose to believe. So there we were, he and I on the last day of our vacation, taking the sheets off his bed and cleaning up, when it happened...when he touched something that stunned me for a second and left me speechless for even longer. I just stood there looking from him to the offending entity in disbelief, then managed to say something like, "Why would you touch that?!" He, of course, could give no response that would even remotely make me feel any better about what he put his beautiful, innocent, clean hand on. Soon I saw in his eyes the realization of what he had just done and so I proceeded to offer the above words I hoped he would live by for the rest of his life. Yes, it was that gross. As we lifted the bottom sheet off the bed he had been sleeping on for the past 10 days we saw a rather large reddish stain near the upper middle part of the bed, on the side he had slept on. I instantly recognized it as dried blood and immediately made that observation known by saying something like, "Ew, that's dried blood!" My son, for reasons still unknown to me, proceeds to put his hand on the bloodstain and move it around as if to actually be able to feel its presence on his fingertips. And that's what it took for me to have a heart-to-heart with this young man about the importance of thinking before placing one's hands on anything. Then I sent him straight to the bathroom to wash his hands three times. The question of why there was a huge dried blood stain on the bed didn't even occur to me until after we left...