I’m currently on hiatus from The Domestic Front. While I am gone, I am republishing posts which originally appeared on my companion blog, Savour Home. This post was originally published in October 2010.
Yesterday, as the Nuni and I were making our long drive home, I heard her say, “Oh look, a scary maskes sticker.” (She calls skeleton “scary masks” and it’s so darling I haven’t the heart to correct her). I thought nothing of it — as the mother of a three year old, I am constantly finding stickers lurking in the strangest places, and find them relatively harmless, as toys go.
A few minutes later, I heard a little voice pipe up, “Mama, I want to take a bath when I get home.” Now, the wee Nuni does love a bath, but “when we get home” requests are usually limited to watching Spongebob or eating chocolate.
“Why do you want to take a bath?”
“I need to wash out my nose.”
(Suspicious) “Why do you need to wash out your nose?”
“Because there’s a sticker in it.”
Of course. In the middle of the Sepulveda pass, my daughter had taken a seemingly innocuous sticker and stuck it up her nose. I, visions of emergency room visits and doctor forceps dancing through my head, told her to get her finger out of there and we would take care of it when we got home. She continued on her merry way, laughing and singing and telling Knock Knock jokes ad infinitum, until I doubted the sticker in the nose story. Three year olds are notoriously unreliable reporters.
When we arrived at home, I called her over, ready to apply the brand new needlenose tweezers I had bought that day, fortuitously. She refused. Her father looked into her nose and saw nothing. We blew her nose vigorously and got a booger, but nothing of import. The Nuni changed her story, insisting it was a booger, and not a sticker after all.
I have been three myself, however, so I dragged her into the bathroom (the best lit room in the house), laid her, kicking and screaming and insisting there was nothing there, on the counter, head pillowed at a towel, and peered into her nostrils. I could see snot (there is no such thing as a three year old without a runny nose) but nothing that was clearly a sticker. However, in the back of her right nostril, I saw a faint line. It resembled nothing so much as a string of mucus, but I, undeterred, wielding my needle nose tweezers, went on a fishing expedition.
The first time I went in I got nothing but slimy tweezers. The second time was the same. But after the third try (and no pokes – I’m good), I triumphantly pulled out a folded, snotty skeleton sticker that my child had shoved up her nose.
The moral of the story is threefold: 1) You can never have enough pairs of tweezers, 2) even stickers can be dangerous in the right hands, and 3) never believe your preschooler’s protestations regarding the innocence of her nose. In fact, you might want to go check it right now.
