Don't Worry, It Came Out

Tonight at dinner, Bry was enjoying the delicacy we like to call sqrice, consisting of pureed butternut squash mixed with rice. He usually starts out very civilly scooping the sqrice out of the bowl with his spoon, but sooner or later, he gives in to his desire for quicker food delivery and just starts shoving fistfuls of the stuff in his mouth. As you might imagine, this gets quite messy.

Squash usually gets smeared all over his face, in his hair, on the table, etc. Today, however, Bry was especially enthusiastic about shoveling in the sqrice, and managed to shove a large grain of rice right up his nostril. Now, this is not the first time that he's gotten pieces of food up his nose. Most of the time, I just pick it out and all is well (and now every non-parent reading this is completely grossed out). But tonight, the rice had traveled a little too far north for me to fish it out, so I went to plan B: the nose sucking bulby-thing (you know what I'm talking about). When Bry was an infant and prone to congestion, he hated the nose sucking bulby-thing with the heat of a thousand hot suns. It proved to be pretty much worthless. As he matured and his father began to instruct him on the humor of things that come out of his nose, Bry started to find the bulby-thing hilarious. Steve would clean out his nose, declare "EW!" and Bry would collapse in giggles. We haven't had to pull out the bulby-thing in awhile, but tonight when I got it out of the closet, Bry started giggling and did what he always tries to do any time I get near his face with it: shove it in his mouth.

When I finally wrestled him into a position to try to remove the rice, I discovered that the bulby-thing is also next to worthless in extracting food from a child's nose. It is good for shoving food further up a child's nose, however.

So, plan C: Q-tip. Result: see result for plan B.

And on to plan D: hold the other nostril closed and blow as hard as possible into Bry's mouth. Now, let me just say that plan D wasn't borne from any sort of "ah-ha" parenting moment of genius (not that I don't have those on a regular basis). Rather, one of Steve's friends had recently told us the story of her sister taking her toddler to the ER after she had shoved a pea up her nose (the toddler, not the sister). Apparently the ER doc described this technique to the mom and made her do it right then and there to demonstrate the amount of force needed to dislodge a foreign object stuck up a nose: a lot. At the time, Steve and I found this story hilarious, and luckily filed it away for future reference. And that is how at 5:45 this evening, Steve found himself telling Bry to look at the ceiling, pinching his nose closed, and blowing into his mouth three or four times until the rice was ejected from Bry's nose and somehow, defying the laws of physics, ended up in Bry's mouth. I'm not sure how Steve ended up being the one to do the blowing; all I know is that I wasn't volunteering. Bry also found this process hilarious and ten minutes later said: "Ceiling!" "Nose!" which I interpreted back to him as, "Yeah, daddy told you to look at the ceiling and then he cleaned out your nose." Bry smiled and looked expectantly at Steve. Steve did not volunteer to repeat the process.