Up Your Nose

Apparently I need a dogblog. (But someone's already claimed that.)

But you can thank God almighty I do not have a mommy blog (at least in any ordinary sense of the term) or else it might go something like this:

I consider Bella, in her late-threes, to be smarter than average but certainly not brilliant. Smart enough that she lulls me into a state of complacency. She likes asking how things are spelled, and making up her own counting problems ending with a celebratory upward arm motion, "I just did math!" (Certainly not a trait she encountered in a Barbie commercial.) At the dog party on Sunday, she ran around asking everyone if they'd like a drink. "Would you like a Sun Tea? DON'T WORRY I'LL GET IT!" (arriving minutes later with very warm drink over modicum of ice). "Is that your beer? Do you need another? Do you LIKE beer?" The hostess gene is definitely recessive.

I should not have been surprised, and yet I was, when yesterday morning, already late leaving the house for a day in the country, I glanced into Bella's room where she had contentedly been playing by herself for 10 minutes, to find her awkwardly hunched over her shell collection on the floor.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to get a seashell out of my nose."

A call to our neighbor who is a pediatrician currently on emergency rounds yielded the following information: a) he was currently 90 minutes away, not four doors down. b) Could we feel it? (I squeezed her nostrils together. No dice.) c) Did we own long tweezers? (why in hell would we own long tweezers? But I put them on my mental Target list which I'm sure I'll forget in 5 minutes time.) d) Could we get her to blow her nose out of one nostril?

DUDE, do you have a three year old? Can you get a three year old to do ANY.T.H.I.N.G? Cuz really I'll leave the shell up there and take picking up her clothes or not dipping her hand into her beverage cup or any number of assorted daily activities that will make my life eons easier.

Well, said he, the emergency room is likely not to be crowded this early on a holiday. So, in our most chipper yet resigned voice we said, "Bella, we're going to the hospital." At which point she began to bawl and the whole process of crying and snotting loosened things up, I got her to blow with me holding one nostril shut, and out came the seashell.

Crisis averted. And today we were light enough to joke that had it not come out, we probably would've driven to Children's (not the closet ER by any stretch of the imagination) and paged our point people. We guffawed at sending our seashell to Baylor for the genome project. But this is what deadbaby parents do, I suppose, is realize life is a series of medical mishaps and it's all fun and games until the seashell enters the optical cavity.

SO: SPILL IT. What did you jam into your nose or ear when you were a kid? You can post anonymously. And if you failed to be so curious, feel free to rat on your sibling.