This is my cranky, again!

There are 3,059,0348,269,050 things that can kill/maim/disfigure/etc. babies.

I get told of at least 8 of them each day, usually because I'm doing at least two of them. Examples include that I clean the litterbox that my only-indoor cat uses (wearing gloves and a mask, and washing my hands for 2 minutes afterward), and yesterday's brie-on-ham sandwich that I drew flak for eating even though I'd heated the ham and brie so long the latter was threatening to bubble away.

I don't know whether I'm sensitive to this kind of thing because I was once accused of child neglect because a then-3-year-old Kieran wandered out my front door and down the street wearing a T-shirt and overnight pants, but it remains that I'm sensitive to the overload.

But I think I'm just sensitive to it because it's a barrage, even when it comes from well-meaning friends. Every day something new turns out to be teratogenic, or some baby product gets a massive recall, and pregnant women go insane with all the Danger: Will Robinson news that crosses the wires each day.

If you run across interesting information that ties in with pregnancy, I would very very much appreciate it if you shared it in a more general way so that it doesn't get lumped in with the barrage. Pretend, just to humor me, that I'm not your only pregnant friend.

(Now that I think about it, I'm amazed that no one has sent me a note about the cookie dough recall, since that would have a much higher chance of affecting me even though I finally quit looking at it as a snack food when I started addressing my binge eating problem.)

I really do try to keep a sense of humor about this stuff. I do.

But that sense of humor skips to "fail" a lot more easily lately.