My Thursday

MOMMY BANDAIDS

Blessing #2 has been busy with her purse project. Apparently she salvaged a couple collapsed boxes from the recycle pile, reconstructed them, and attached handles. I overheard her talking about the purses with B#4.

“Your purse has an ugly box (brown pasta box) with a pretty strap (pink satin ribbon), and my purse has an ugly strap (old piece of rope) with a pretty box.”

B#3 is listening to the conversation, and he chimes in: “Your pretty box is one of Moma’s bandaid boxes. It had mommy bandaids in it. See? I can tell by looking at the picture. That’s Moma’s box, and those are bandaids in the picture.”

This confuses me, as I don’t get the whole bandaid thing, but I let it slide. I’ll figure it out later… “later” being when the girls pass through the kitchen toting their new purses.

Meanwhile, B#3 and I, with a little help from B#6, had our own little project going on this afternoon. We were busy baking tortilla chips. The other blessings were all in the living room building Barbie mansions out of the wooden blocks.

Mid-chip baking, B#2 brings a crying B#5 to me. B#5 has gotten a stuffy nose. Unfortunately he wasn’t suffering from allergies or a cold. Rather, he was suffering from the yellow, unidentified object he had shoved up his right nostril.

After unsuccessfully attempting to dislodge it (via pinky nail, mini-tweezers, the baby’s suction bulb, and “Blow your nose!”), I finally called the doctor’s office.

The rest of the afternoon boils down to this:

I load the six kids into the monkey bus and remind them, while we’re driving, that the doctor’s office is not a playground and we will ALL act appropriately.

THE WAITING ROOM

Her naptime disrupted, B#6 almost immediately starts to fuss. I insert soothie into her mouth. She spits soothie out of her mouth.

Fussing continues.

I reinsert and wiggle soothie in her mouth.
*suck, suck, spit*
Fussing continues.

This process repeats itself for quite a while. I finally succumb to her wailing and get Miss Crabby out of the carseat.

Fussing continues… only now it is moving around the waiting room, as she is in my arms.

B#2 has a toy that another kid wants. I hear the other kid’s mom saying, “No, honey, give it back to her. She had it first.” Yes, B#2 had it first, but B#2 is also seven and this other kid is like one. I give B#2 "the eye"- the one that says "let the baby have the toy."

B#1 half-jogs (something akin to the 6 a.m. speedwalkers at the mall) to the water cooler at the far side of the waiting room. This has been purposely placed in a somewhat remote area that is as far from the “kid” section as possible. B#1 knows she must be quick because she also knows I will probably stop her.

She is right.

Baby in arms, still fussing, I do my own mall-speedwalker-dash and stop her as she’s filling her little paper cup. I stop her... but not before B#5 has seen where she’s gone and what she’s doing.

As he is quite fascinated by wiggling the little levers that dispense water, I spend the next ten minutes dragging him back to the kid area and redirecting his attention.

B#4 is squawking because she does not want help stacking the puzzle blocks on the puzzle-block pegs. She’s got lots of help with B#s 1, 2, 3, and 5… thus, lots of squawking. I have to hush her and shoo the others away to other things.

B#s 2 and 3 are reading and playing the miniature I SPY book. This fun soon becomes a more competitive interaction, as each hurries to be the first to locate the hidden objects.

“FOOTBALL! There’s the football!”
“I see a golden ring. GOLDEN RING! Right there! See?”
“Oh,oh! Look! I found the pearly smile!”
“I already found that first!”

The nurse calls us back. We pass the doc in the hallway. He looks up B#5’s nose and says, “I think you could get that out of there. Did you try blowing it out?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But when I said ‘blow’ he’d just sniffle it in farther up.”

(At the time I misinterpreted his question… I understand now.)

My little munchkins and I follow the nurse into the exam room.

THE EXAM ROOM

As the nurse is asking me the basic appointment questions for B#5, B#1 is standing next to me and proceeds to authoritatively answer her questions.

Nurse: We’ve got a foreign object in the nose?
B#1: Yes.
Nurse: Any allergies?
B#1, shaking her head: No. No allergies.

As the nurse turns her head to input her notes, I tell B#1 to go sit down and hush.

Doc comes into the room, interrupting the nurse during this intake process. He says again that he thinks I could probably get this out of his nose myself and offers to hold B#6, still fussing, while I try.

“Sure,” I say. I hand over Miss Crabby.

Doc coaches me through removal-of-foreign-object-in-child’s-nose.*

Doc realizes that the triage nurse had not instructed me, over the phone, of the ROFOICN method, and when we later leave the exam room, he finds said nurse and instructs her to instruct said method upon future phone calls.

The foreign object is no longer foreign. It has been identified as a square, yellow bead.

Doc says we’re free to go.

I can see by the nurse’s expression that she does not know what to do in this unusual situation. Doc takes the fee slip from her, says “I’ll take care of that,” and then answers her confused look with a grin and a “Mom got it out; I didn’t get it out” as he puts an X across the top of the fee slip, writes “no charge,” and signs it.

*The ROFOICN method:

-Squeeze child’s unobstructed nostril closed.
-Cover child’s mouth with own mouth.
-Blow forcefully until lodged object dislodges, flies out of child’s nostril, and ricochets off your shoulder.
-Scramble to capture bouncing object… so you can take a picture of it.
-Wipe away any boogers that may also dislodge and adhere to your cheek.

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