Mercurochrome

I was watching one of those shows on HGTV yesterday. It was the one where people look at three homes and then buy one of them. You get to go on the house hunt with them and watch as they make the big decision. One of my biggest peeves, the one that makes me scream at the television, is when the buyers walk into a home and start bitching about the color of the walls. Probably the easiest fix there is in a new house is repainting it. Anyway, the thing that I found to be so stupid on the show I watched yesterday, was when the couple got all concerned about the stairs to the second floor.

"Oh dear, poor little Missy might fall down those stairs."

"I agree my dearest wife. It's a death trap waiting to kill our first born."

You have to ask, why were they looking at a two story home if they were so worried about their spawn taking a dive down some stairs?

I don't know how kids born into this generation are going to make it or how they are going to survive life. If there is anything that I have to give credit to my parents for, besides feeding us, housing us, changing my poopy diapers, and putting up with a lot of screaming fights with my siblings, is their hands off approach to child rearing. We had stairs in our house. I don't remember my parents hovering over me as I figured out the laws of gravity. It was, "There are the stairs. At the top of them is your bedroom. Figure it out." And I did. I do remember crawling on my hands and knees up and down the stairs at first, but it wasn't too long before I was bounding up and down them, two risers at a time. Mom and Dad came from a generation that went through the Great Depression, and World War II. They experienced my dad's father being murdered on the street in front of his house, and listened to the story of my other grandfather about how he was put in an orphanage because my great grandfather's new wife didn't want boys in the house. So stairs, no problem. Kids climbing up a tree, no problem. Now it's not that some of us didn't fall down those stairs from time to time. We did. We also learned how to slide down the banister, and just how high up in a tree we could climb, and we learned early on how to put Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid on. And now I just learned that Mercurochrome is poison when I looked it up on Google.