I feel so silly actually sitting at my computer typing a blog about this...but it is precisely because it is so silly that I feel I should do it. This is one of those crazy things that I am sure I will forget after my children are grown.....
Just last week, while I was in the midst of going over my daughter's math lesson with her, my youngest son started crying and ran into our classroom, obviously very disturbed about something. My older son followed him in explaining the problem, "He just stuck a bead up his nose!" Now, the problem was fairly easy to solve. I held his opposite nostril closed and told him to blow-- the little plastic bead popped right out into my hand. I have had experience with this type of thing before! I only wondered, this time, why his older brother had stood there and watched without stepping in to stop him.
I wondered about this because of my first experience with foreign objects lodged in the nose of one of my children. It happened one night at dinner. I had only three children at the time, the oldest being about 4 1/2 years old, the youngest only about 3 months old. My son, who was the only boy at the time, was not quite 2 years old. Now on this particular evening I was feeling very proud of what a phenomenal mother I was. (This should have been my first clue that something was going to go wrong. God almost always finds a way to knock me off my pedestal whenever I attempt to hoist myself up onto one.) Tim was working that evening and I was alone with the three children, all under the age of 5. Despite being on my own, I had prepared a nice, healthy dinner and we were all sitting down to the table to eat together (the baby was in her little seat on the counter next to us). This is where I was feeling so good about what a great mother I was. Somehow, however, I missed what my son was doing right next to me at the table. It wasn’t until halfway through the meal that I somehow discovered that he had a pea up his nose. I was a little distraught and unsure what to do but I got the tweezers from the bathroom and removed the pea, only to discover there was another one behind it and then another behind that. After removing the peas we finished our dinner and it was a little while later that he blew another pea out and then another. At this point I was completely incredulous! How many peas had he shoved in there?!?!? I got out a flashlight and looked up his little nose. I could not tell if there was anything left in there or not. I gathered him and his sisters up and went to the neighbor’s house to see if they could tell better than me. They also examined his nose with a flashlight but came to the same conclusion I had. There might be more in there but we couldn’t tell for sure. Thank goodness for wonderful neighbor’s- they kept the girls for me while I took my son to the pediatric urgent care center to have his nose examined for stray peas. This was not a pleasant experience for a two year old but I had hoped it would teach him a lesson. I had thought all these years that it had until the fateful day last week when he watched his little brother shove a bead up his nose and did not warn him of the possible dangers!
So what is the point of this story? Only that we as parents must endure a lot of craziness in life as we raise our children. That life will never be predictable with children around. And, most of all, that we should never feel we've mastered the job of parenting because just when we do-they'll catch us off guard and prove us wrong again and again!
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