Tucker came in from playing outside, with his mouth full of what appeared to be a very tasty, crunchy treat. It sounded like he was crunching ice with his little teeth. He stood next to me, munching, munching, munching.
I said, "Hi, Tuck. Are you enjoying a treat?"
Munch, munch, munch.
"Robb, what did you give him?"
"I didn't give him anything to eat."
And then I realized, Tucker isn't just chewing. He is frantically trying to show me that he has bitten off more than he can chew, quite literally. He needed help.
"Tuck, what is in your mouth?"
"Wocks."
"Rocks? Rocks?? There are rocks in your mouth?"
I stayed calm, encouraging him to spit them out into my hand, when his gag reflex kicked into high gear. Before we knew it, I was doing the finger swipe, clearing out all of the morsels of geology he had put in his mouth, just to see how it felt.
Boys.
1 comment:
Tricia, I don't know if this will comfort or alarm you, but these incidents do get easier to process mentally. This means, of course, that they will continue to occur, but you already knew that, right?
Kid #4 was crawling along the edge of the kitchen at about 7 mos old, heading toward the sliding glass doors, about 6 feet away from where I was semi-buried in a book at the table. Reading being as rare as chocolate, wine, and....well, you know, that other stuff, I was savoring it, salving my conscience by keeping her in the peripheral vision of my practiced mother's eye.
She stops, picks up something off the floor and pops it in her mouth. Knowing that the floor is undoubtedly littered with escaped Cheerios, I sigh, put the book down and wander over to make sure.
Not a Cheerio. A moth. A dessicated moth that I now vaguely remember not-seeing for the past several days on my way in and out said door.
With Kid #1, this would probably have occasioned no small amount of panicked telephone calls to my mother, my husband, my friends, my neighbors and whoever else I could have roped into my crisis of abjectly poor motherhood.
Kid #4? I sigh, roll my eyes and hold out my hand. "Spit it out, sweetie. No? Fine. We'll count it toward lunch."
(People in other parts of the world DO ingest all manner of bugs without any ill effects whatsoever, I am told. I'm sure of it.) If she turns blue in the next 20 minutes, _then_ I'll panic.
My own prayer would have been for the kids to become progressively less prone to kid-like behavior, not for me to become more immune to it. Either way works, I guess.
At least rocks aren't organic. (Is that a good thing?) :)
Happy Mother's Day.
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