Friday, February 1, 2013

With a Rubber Hose

We were all rushing around like bees in a hive:
4:45p Daycare pickup
5:15p Early dinner for the girls
5:45p Matt's class at the gym
6:15p Grace's gymnastics class

At 5:40 Clare decided to put herself on the evenings agenda too.

I was barking orders and clearing dishes and clearly not paying attention.

She looked at me slyly.
"Mama," she said with a smile, "In my nose."
"What's in your nose sweetie? Buggers? Do you need a tissue??"
"No," she said, "Up my nose. No buggers. A bead!"

Time froze for a second. She was so proud of herself.

Upon inspection, there it was.  As a distraction, I had pulled out a big bag of beads over President's Day weekend and let the girls and their friend string necklaces. The rubber of the elastic cording in the bag must have been getting old, because the necklaces have been systematically breaking and spraying nostril sized beads all over the floor. I thought I had been doing a good job of cleaning them up.

I tried trying to wiggle the bead back down her nose with my fingers from the outside. It wasn't budging. In fact, with the way she was fighting me, it was sliding further up. I called Matt. By the time he came home from his abandoned class, Doctor Google had given us some new ideas:

Try tweezers! - Except as soon as she saw us coming with them she would start to scream and thrash so violently we were afraid of poking the bead up into her brain.

Use a shop vac to suck it out! - Which we do own as part of the ill fated pool draining experiment, but they are big and loud and the hose was the size of 1/3 of her face. So we tried the vacuum, which didn't go over well either, because I don't vacuum. Ever. Well, only on special occasions. It is usually something we leave to cleaning crews, so Clare has only ever heard the vacuum 2 or 3 times in her life. That option did not go over well either. And now she was crying so hard she was doing the opposite of the vacuum and starting to suck the bead up further into her nose all by herself.

So at this point we were talking about the immediate care center. And Grace has realized that her chances of going to gymnastics were getting slimmer by every passing minute and starts to have a meltdown.

At the clinic, the doctor was indeed able to remove the bead in the predicted 30 seconds, but it was well worth the $50 copay. She would have never let us get it out.

And now the house has been purged of the beads and we repeat the daily mantra of "I promise I will not put anything up my nose. No beads in nose. I promise."


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