A guest blogger: HotMom

My friend HotMom is a dear friend from college, where we attended Journalism school together. HotMom has left our fair city by the bay to live in the Burbs with her lovely husband and adorable 2-year-old son. We correspond daily, and today she sent me this. I enjoyed it thorougly and I expect you will too:

I thought it would be nice to go have a picnic dinner with Kai at the park last night, just like my mom and I used to do before we went grocery shopping each week. She and I would eat burritos from Taco Bell, but we got hot dogs and hamburgers instead. Rather than getting fries, I opted for the ever-so-healthy carrot sticks and apple sauce side combo…

So we went to the park and we ate and stared up at the big trees and ran around the playground and dug in the dirt had a lovely time. We ate our dinner and Kai saved his carrot sticks for the car ride home. He sat so quietly in the back seat, gleefully eating the carrots while I sang and sang along to the radio, completely oblivious to the sinister goings-on in the back seat.

When we arrived home, he said “Mommy, carrot... nose.” Obviously this was just silly toddler babble! There was no carrot on his nose! “No mommy, IN nose!” Um… let me see. No, I don’t see anything. Enough with the crazy talk!

But he persisted, so I got out a flashlight and lo and behold – there was a carrot in his nose. Lodged waaaay up there where the sun don’t shine. It looked tiny enough, so I tried to make him blow it out. To no avail. I tried to smush it down from the outside. That seemed to hurt. I stuck that bulb aspirator thing up there and tried to suck it out. It didn’t budge.

I called our pediatrician, fearing that Kai would suffocate in the middle of the night if I didn’t get this thing out. He actually picked up the phone (which never happens), and said that the real concern was that Kai could contract a nasty and painful sinus infection if we didn’t get it out of there. And so we went to Urgent Care. At 7:30pm. With no sign of Daddy in sight (he’s in Atlanta on a business trip, and had his RINGER OFF the entire night because he was at dinner. Doghouse!).

Miraculously, there was only one other person in the waiting room. She was holding her stomach as though she was suffering from an excruciating and highly contagious virus of some sort, so we sat waaay across the room from her. But there was a bright yellow sign above the registrations desk – something about “staffing shortages… longer than average wait times…” Oh joy!

Kai was bouncing off the walls. Literally. Squealing. Up down up down up down. On the floor (gross!). Playing drums on the chairs. Non stop. For an hour. While 10 other injured and sick people came crawling in to join us.

We finally saw a physician’s assistant who said he wasn’t sure he could get the carrot out. Kai was quite a trooper, actually excited to see the “doctor”, sit in the big boy examination chair, etc. Until he came in with The Stick. He laid Kai back, shined a light up his nose, and proceeded to dig up his nostril farther than I thought humanly possible. Kai SCREAMED something awful and out it flew. The offending carrot! It was way bigger than I imagined it would be. Especially compared to his little 2-year-old nostrils. So I held him and calmed him down and took a photo of the carrot chunk lying there on the table with my camera phone.

Just when you think your highly intelligent child would never run out in traffic, eat glue, smear his poo on the couch, shove a carrot up his nose, etc, he does it! And that is the moral of this story. Expect the unexpected.