Foreign body in the body

Isn't it amazing how, for the first child, you read a ginormous stack of books, follow them to the letter, never miss a well-baby visit, never fail to follow the doctor's instructions to the letter.....then the next baby comes along and all of that goes out the window and you just go into survival mode????  As long as that little person is alive, then you're doing A-okay.

Handy Daddy and I are both oldest children.  Then we had the Bug, and we were a home of three oldest children.

Then we had Tootsie.

And she has pretty much rocked our world.  The three of us oldest children collectively adore that little "baby," and it seems she is already getting away with everything.

The thing about oldest children, in our experience, is that the oldest child is more cautious, serious, orderly....just kind of a "by the book" kinda person.  Which is, I guess, why that ginormous stack of books was so applicable with our oldest.

Then we have Tootsie, the little daredevil, goofy, and "anything goes" child.  And she has really given us a run for our money.

This is her being all  Evel Knievel on the four-wheeler my dad gifted her with just 5 minutes earlier.

Her latest shenanigan went down on Saturday night.  She was sitting in her high chair, eating a bowl of popcorn.  Never mind the Bug wasn't allowed to eat popcorn until she was three years old, and Tootsie is only 18 months old.  Tootsie is the "baby" and, therefore, is invincible. 

So, she was eating a bowl of popcorn, and begins to let out these piercing screams.  Handy Daddy and I look at her like, "what the....???"  After several minutes of the screaming, I become quite annoyed concerned.  She was rubbing her nose a little, and Handy Daddy was worried she had put something up there.  I scoffed at the idea.  We have girls.  Girls don't do stuff like that.

I told him to pick her up, and she rested her head on his shoulder and cried for a good long while.  We then decided that she had to be teething.  That's why she was crying while she was eating.  Poor baby...her teeth hurt.  So we gave her some Tylenol and a teething ring and went outside to try to distract her from the pain.

This is her with her sister about 20 minutes after insertion and 10 minutes before discovery of the popcorn kernel.

After we were out there a while, she wanted to swing.  So I strapped her in and as she was on the upswing, I spotted something in her right nostril.

Popcorn kernel.

We head back into the house and try to suction it out with the suction bulb.  We push it so far in, we cannot see it anymore.  I called my neighbor, who is a pediatrician, and he suggested I take her to the ER, since he didn't have the proper tool at home to retrieve the popcorn kernel.

Thank the Good Lord, my cousin, who is a nurse in the Children's ER, was working and they slipped us in and out in 30 minutes.  No popcorn kernel was retrieved.  It seems Handy Daddy and I had pushed it all the way down and she swallowed it.  I wonder how much that ER visit cost us to figure that out?

I blamed the whole thing on Handy Daddy and said she got that from his side of the family.  He was quick to point out that it was MY siblings who did that sort of thing.  And his mother confirmed that he and his brothers never stuck any foreign bodies into their bodies.

He's right, you know.

I was the oldest child, so I never partook in any of this buffoonery.  But one of my brothers stuck M&Ms and rocks into his nose.  Another brother swallowed a gigantic button that had to be surgically removed from his esophagus.  And my baby sister put BBs into her ear.  They all took their own little trips to the ER.

I'm afraid.  I'm very afraid.

And I'm not having any more kids.