My two-and-a-half-year-old son is fortunate to be loved and cherished by many people - two parents, two sets of grandparents, a great-grandmother, and aunt and uncle, and many others. He loves it when we are all together, and he gets super charged with excitement when we gather for birthdays and holidays.

Although he enjoys seeing each person, he does have preferences about who does certain things for him. When he wakes up in the morning, although his daddy has been getting him out of bed most days for the past several months to give me a few extra minutes of sleep (yay Daddy!), my son still calls out for me when he's ready to get up. Sometimes he's a bit more insistent. "Mama do it," he says.

Daddy always says, "Mama is sleeping." Sometimes he adds, "I'm getting you up. I always get you up."
A few days ago, my son demonstrated his ever-expanding language skills when Daddy said, "I'll get you up."

"Mama do it. You are NOT the best," my son replied.

Wow.

I took a minute to be amazed over the fact that my son could use a superlative that way, and then I went in to explain that he had hurt his daddy's feelings by saying what he said. He acted like he understood, but today he loudly pronounced "You are NOT the best," as soon as his daddy showed up this morning. Daddy didn't take no for an answer, and we went on our merry way.

I learned that he pulled the "You are not the best" routine on my parents the day before he used it here. My son wanted my mother to play football with him, and "Gram" said that "Pap" would do it. "No," my son replied. "Pap is not the best!" Pap and Gram laughed, which meant that my son was destined to repeat that phrase. He loves to make people laugh.

I will continue to tell him that that behavior is hurtful, and hopefully it will fade as he learns better ways to express himself. And I'll prepare myself for the day that I will hear that I am not "the best."

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It appears that this infection can occur in people in various situations, including those who have experienced trauma with plant material, who have chronic ocular surface diseases, immunodeficiencies, and very infrequently, in contact lens wearers. According to the web release, an estimated 30 million people in the United States wear soft contact lenses and the annual incidence of this problem is estimated to be four to 21 per 10,000 soft contact lens users (if you multiply that out, that's an awful lot of people who get this serious disorder simply because they wear contacts). Fusarium keratitis occurs more often in warm climates and can be treated with topical and oral medications, or, if necessary, through a corneal transplant.

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