It had to happen sometime, right? Someday my curious, experimental son would shove something in one of the (not so) cavernous holes on his body. He chose the ear. I'm thankful it wasn't his nose.
When I got E. out of his quiet time the other day, he told me he had something in his ear: "Ear put," to be exact. I didn't know what he was talking about. Ear plug? I kept asking and looking in there. I couldn't see anything, but imagined a wheel from a matchbox car and a trip to Patient First in our near future.
I got a flashlight and was able to see a little black thing in there. Then E. volunteered that it was a stick.Of course! What?
Dave was napping so I gently and lovingly awakened him (Shove. Shove. "Hey! Wake up and hold this flashlight!). I got the tweezers and saw what I was about to do ending either really well or really poorly. Maybe I should have taken him in somewhere, but I'm an avid do-it-yourself-er and. . . I'm cheap.
I must say, there's an amazing sense of accomplishment that comes from pulling something small out of your kids ear with tweezers. Turns out, it was a little piece of bark. I guess the homemade wooden blocks (do-it-yourself-er!) didn't turn out so well and five layers of Modpodge weren't enough to keep all the bark on the block. Now I know I probably should have sanded it off in the first place. . . Well, you learn as you go, right?
So then we had a talk about how we don't put things in the holes of our bodies. And Dave contributed by adding that if you put stuff up there, your ear will break and no doctors will ever ever be able to fix it. (He does have a flare for melodrama at times; it's one of the things I love about him.) I'm not sure that warning really sunk in, though, because the next morning E. said, "Mommy, if your eye breaks, I will fix it."
I think I'm raising an optimist.
