Kids and holes

What is it about holes that kids have to stick things into them... to include holes in their face!  I came home from dinner one evening to find the babysitter frantic.  The two boys, then aged 5 and 2, had stuffed their ears full of popcorn kernels!  It would take over an hour for my husband and I to carefully ease the seeds out of their ears. 

When my daughter was a toddler she got hold of a pony bead, which is about the size of a pea.  And yep, you guessed it, up the nose it goes!  Getting it out wasn't the hard part, keeping the child still long enough to safely extract it was!.  By the time I got it out I was covered with drool, snot and tears.... and it wasn't all from the baby!

We left the south and I thought we had all outgrown this facination with plugging holes... until about 9 months later we noticed that the oldest boy was having problems hearing.  I peered in his ears which seemed clean enough but insisted that I should try cleaning them out just in case.  The left ear came out clean, my boy had always been good about swabbing his ears after his shower.  When I tried to clean the right ear my boy howled.  I was surprised since I knew I hadn't inserted the Q-tip in very deep at all.  I tried again and again he hollered in pain.  I grabbed a flashlight and peered into the ear, and something reflected the light back at me.  I asked what he had put in his ear and he insisted that there was nothing in there.  Well, eyes don't lie so I made him lay down and I pulled out my tweezers.  In just a few seconds, amidst his pained protests, I pulled out a pencil cap, that had obviously been blocking his ear for quite a while!  How long you may wonder?  Well, I bought the decorative pencil for him just before we left our old home.... 9 months ago... and he had misplaced the very day he got it.  Thinking back he recalled that his ear was itchy and he had used the pencil to scratch at it.  9 months!

Now that was surely the last of it, right?  Wrong!  My middle son came up to me a few years later with an embarrassed look on his face.  It took a little prying but he finally told me what was bothering him.  He had been playing with a little calculator battery, one of those little flat round ones and had stuck it up his nose.  When he tried to get it out, it only went deeper into his nostril.  Out came theflashlight and sure enough, way in the back of his nose was a tiny silver battery.  Out came the tweezers, but by that time the battery was all slimy, and wedged into one of the nasal cavaties.  My husband had my son lay on the kitchen table and he tried to remove it but it was in good.  I could just imagine the looks we would get in the emergency room as we considered our options.  One more try and we were going to hang it up.  My husband moved in with the tweezers and in the process touched the sensitive side of the boy's inner nostril, triggering a sneeze.  Do it again!  I suggested.  2 sneezes later a snot-covered battery shot across the kitchen.  Mission accomplished!  That was the last 'gee, what would happen if I stick this up my nose' incident we've had... knock on wood!

Thinking back I know my baby sister had the same facination.  I remember her once sticking a red vitamin tablet up her nose and when her nose started running it looked like it was bleeding, which really freaked my mom out until she realized the real problem.  Later the same sister stuck a bean up her nose.  Being the caring older sister that I was, I informed her that a bean plant would grow out of her nose if she didn't get it out.  That sent her screaming to my oldest sister who saved her life by removing the bean before it could sprout roots.  To this day though I call my little sister 'Beenie'.