Tales From the Playground: "Did You Wash Your Hands?"

Every four hours or so a sort of organized chaos takes place in my day care rooms – we all go to the bathroom.  A stampede of children rush the split bathrooms, and I stand in the middle to try and keep some sort of organization, safety, and health standards for the 20 or more kids all trying to pee simultaneously.  

Twenty or so times I repeat this conversation verbatim to each child –

“Did you go potty?”

The child then murmurs some sort of incoherent response that could be a yes, no, or an “I didn’t make it, there’s a load in my pants, but I’m not going to tell you that I’ll just suck it up and sit in my own poop for the rest of the day.”

“Did you wash your hands?”

Girls are usually a yes head nod, boys more often or not are a guilty yes head nod, meaning they are lying through their teeth and never even looked at the sink. In this case, I point to the sink and the boys trudge up onto the stool so they can reach the sink and sometimes even turn on the water.

“Did you use soap?”

Similar response from most girls, and the boys give me this look that says – “Why would we use this thing called soap? We don’t even know what that is. You are crazy.”

I point at the soap dispenser, and the boys begin squirting anywhere from one to five or as many handfuls of soap they can get before I notice and alert them that they probably have enough to bathe in.

Kids also do this weird thing where they will wash their hands clean of soap over and over because they are so entranced by their reflection in the mirror. I like to think I’m helping them overcome their young narcissism by re-directing them to the paper towels and repeating that they only need two paper towels.

You think you need more, kid? No thank you.

There’s one particular kid, who I will call Big Eyes for obvious reasons, who is about four or five. Every day he goes into the bathroom, and every day I watch him peek around the corner of the stalls, and then make a run for it back to the room. He is convinced that he can get away unseen without washing his hands. No such luck, Big Eyes, I know your sneaky and devious ways, and I am a college student. I am also six feet tall and can see from the bathrooms to the room, and consequently, you trying to escape. 

So I see Big Eyes, and it’s like a slow motion movie when he makes his run for the classroom.

Now, I don’t know much about football except that I love the Nebraska Huskers, but I do know what a tackle is. And Big Eyes doesn’t just get tackled, he gets owned.

I don’t even have to ask – “Did you wash your hands?”

I set him down, and he walks back to the sink.

And he washes those hands.