Quote:Almost all of my nieces and nephews have had ear infections. A few of them having had *many*, going through multiple ear tubes and other treatments and risking permanent hearing loss. This type of thing appears (anecdotally) to be fairly commonplace in their generation.
My son (now 3 and a half) has had three infections total, none of them serious. Two of them were minor eye infections when he was an infant (very common) which was cleared up by an over the counter gel, and the third was an ear infection which required a prescription antibiotic (actually, it required two different antibiotics because he had an allergic reaction to the first, which was very scary). It also cleared up within a few days. he hasn't had any sort of infection in well over a year now.
My wife and I keep our place and our son as clean as we can, but we don't go nuts with antibacterial crap. He spends most of the day outside playing in the dirt with other kids at the babysitters'. He always comes home filthy, but happy :) He rarely gets colds, and when he does it's always minor and only bugs him for a day or two before clearing up on its own. He's as healthy a kid as a parent could hope for.
On the other hand, I was a very sickly child due to allergies. I was allergic to pretty much everything under the son before going through intensive and often painful allergy shots for many years. My parents let me get as dirty as I wanted to in and around our rural home, so my anecdotal evidence fails at anything worthwhile.
The other weird thing is that after being allergy-free for 20+ years, a couple of summers ago I developed a nasty and really painful sinus infection. My doctor said it was allergy-related. I asked him how that was possible after being "cured" of all my allergies when I was a child, and he said that allergies can pop up at any time :huh:
Quote:That iodine taught you that life could indeed, go on with a boobooed finger, and it would heal up just fine with nothing at all.
My son proudly displays his eternal collection of booboos as badges of honour. He always invites me to poke at them and then tells me how they don't hurt at all because he's "tough", or that they only hurt "a little bit". He took a good chunk of skin off his foot the other day after stepping on a toy, but he refused all treatment and shows to it to everyone he meets.
I have a weird kid.
edit: whoa! That's a cool feature. Apparently when you quote and reply to two people in succession, this new forum software automagically condenses it into a single reply. I like this.