At Least I Know He Could Survive in the Wilderness

If I were a believer in previous lives I would think that my son must have been a goat at some point past. The kid (no pun intended) puts literally everything into his mouth. Everything. Excepting, of course, things that we would like him to put into his mouth, like apples and oranges, and maybe a little red meat or lettuce now and again. Dredging up some past posts will reveal that he has eaten cat litter, dirt, and more recently an ant or two.

People at the grocery store or the laboratory will ask before giving stickers to my two-year-old daughter, but little do they know that it’s not her I have to worry about when it comes to tasting/eating non-food items.

For whatever reason my son has settled on paper as his snack of choice. He has digested large sections of paper bookmarks; gnawed through the plastic cover on DVD cases to get to the paper jacket; even chomped through the binding on nice shiny new board books. Gym shorts with elastic pull type waistbands are another satisfying nibble. Keep chewing on the end of one of those things and a person can produce a string about a foot long.

But as I do not believe in past lives or reincarnation I don’t know that I should be afraid of walking in on him puncturing soup cans with his vicious canines. Thankfully he has not attempted to eat shards of glass or metal shavings. In lieu of those things, I suppose I can handle the nail biting and the finger chomping and the booger eating. I guess I shall sew my own silver lining onto that cloud if there isn’t one there already. I’ll just make sure to hide the needle and thread when I’m done.

It's My Birthday and I'll Eat What I Want To

My baby girl tried to do every fun thing that she could think of to celebrate her first birthday. She climbed onto the chair and trapped herself under the table many, many times. She put her face in the path of her brother’s back swing and was consequently hit in the face by his plastic golf iron. An attempt was made to tip over the garbage can, and she tried to eat some mulch while out in the backyard. She insisted on crawling on the sidewalk instead of in the grass, even though she didn’t have shoes on, and she scraped one of her toes all up. Tops on the list, however, was the inquisitive sampling of a piece of fungus found outside.

Every day I am more convinced that I am going to die of stress: and I am quite sure that this child is going to be the death of me. During the minute it took for me to address whatever request it was that her brother made that caused me to turn my back, she plucked a mushroom out of the ground and as I again turned in her direction she took a bite.

It is rather unfortunate that I have, as of yet, not been given the chance to purchase, steal or otherwise gain any super-powers through skill, osmosis, or freak-accident. The longer that I am a mother, the more I realize that being able to fly or have laser vision wouldn’t be the wisest choice: having stretchy elastic arms would be, that way one’s child would always be within arms reach.

Needless to say, I called my friends at Poison Control. The other two times I found myself in need of their expertise, I was instructed to give milk to the child so I thought it would be a good place to start. The baby wasn’t interested in drinking milk; she wanted to go back outside and forage some more. I spoke to a very reassuring nurse, named Mimi, who informed me that since mushrooms are so hard to identify they treat them all as poisonous, just to be on the safe side.

Since the child had enough sense to spit out the fungi, Mimi didn’t think that she needed emergency care. (If a child actually ingests a mushroom found elsewhere than the refrigerator or the produce section of the grocery store, they need to be taken to the emergency room and given activated charcoal.) Instead, she cautioned me to be on the lookout for the usual signs: nausea, vomiting, abnormal behavior. Since fungal poisoning can manifest itself in many different ways, depending on the type of mushroom, she couldn’t be any more specific. She also informed me that Poison Control would be in touch over the next twenty-four hours to help monitor the birthday girl.

I’m sure that I do not need to expound upon the tension and anxiety that plagued me over the next few hours. Every time the baby cried or fussed, a great hand clenched and twisted all the organs in my chest. It didn’t help that the picture I found on the Internet that most resembled the slimy fungal antagonist had the label poisonous underneath it. When Mimi called during the afternoon she calmed my fears and told me not to let the incident ruin the birthday: “Write it down in her baby book,” she said, “it’s just going to be a birthday to remember.” Business as usual.

Okay.

We read some books.

I killed a freaky looking cricket (or something) in the kitchen.

Both of the kids fought over toys and grabbed and screamed.

The toddler commandeered the baby’s birthday present.

We ate; I cleaned; we slept.

The twenty-four hour mark has passed now, and the baby is no worse for wear. Poison control has placed their last phone call to check up on her. Another day, another disaster averted. Thank God for that. Now, on to year number two for the little monkey. I am quite sure that it would be foolish of me to hope that it’s not too exciting.

Who Brought This?

Everyone, excepting the baby, learned something new about food this Easter Sunday. Not for lack of trying on the baby’s part, for she will try to eat anything presented to her; however, there is only so much food that is palatable for a nine month old.

For my part, I learned that peanut butter cookies dunked until soggy in coffee are a new dangerous favorite for me. Dangerous because although I have self-control in many areas when it comes to food, this does not seem to be one of them. It is quite possible that I would continue to submerge the crunchy cookies until I either went mad from the amount of caffeine I was ingesting or I threw up from the amount of sugar I was introducing into my system. This was the first time I have made this type of cookie since being married six years ago: they were a favorite of my Dad’s and I used to make them when I lived at home with my parents, but I tend to shy away from hard cookies as I prefer soft, chewy ones. It was sometime yesterday evening in the midst of my sugar-induced euphoria that I declared the peanut butter cookie, accompanied by a hot cup of coffee, to be my new favorite. I shall have to be careful and only bake them for very special occasions so as to avoid blatant displays of self-indulgence and gluttony.

My little boy got his first chocolate car. He loves cars and trucks and his Nana couldn’t resist buying him a chocolate racecar. Of course he attempted to drive it and seemed a bit confused when he was told it was for eating, but he soon got over it and happily gnawed off the front bumper.

And then came my husband’s food related learning experience. The poor man has been teased about his garbage disposal approach to eating for many years now. He takes it in stride because he knows it to be largely founded in truth and I believe that he takes some pride in this title. (Only one of our male friends can wolf down a plate of food faster than my husband, and my husband speaks of him with a kind of reverence and admiration). My husband not only has the ability to eat absolutely humungous portions of food, he also finds a wide range of food to be palatable and does not balk from trying new delicacies. Yesterday was no exception. While the rest of the family was recuperating from dessert in Nana’s living room- where I’m sure I was still dunking cookies- my husband wandered into the kitchen in search of more coffee and something to munch on. A short time earlier Nana had placed her cat’s food on the counter next to the percolator so that the baby wouldn’t get into it. As my husband made his way toward the countertop the kitchen was cloaked in a quiet, dusky darkness. I suppose there really is no need for me to say anything further except that my husband not only chewed and swallowed one modest handful, but two, and was on his way back to the living room to see if anyone could tell him what he was eating before the cogs in his brain started to turn and he blurted, “I just ate cat food!” to himself and everyone present as he crossed the threshold of the room.

The customary jokes followed, and my husband expressed his delight at the sheen his coat of fur was sure to get; I was told not to be surprised if I found him curled up on the windowsill licking himself, and he was warned about tracking litter around the house after trips to the cat box. After much laughter and silliness the family eventually succumbed to the return of post-dinner lethargy. All in all, my husband, food connoisseur that he is, declared the whole fiasco to be a success of sorts as he imparted his wisdom that cat food actually doesn’t taste too badly.

Substance Reconnaissance

A crawling baby’s radar for certain things- like cat vomit- is superior to a parent’s. This is probably due to the fact that they are closer to the ground and have the advantage of proper perspective for these sorts of abnormalities of color on the floor. In the hour following our descent to the first floor of the house after awakening this morning, I had to clean cat puke from the floor in three different locations.

Thankfully, it is rare for the cats to regurgitate three times in one day. Much to my dismay the baby did manage to find one of these sites before me. I got to her while she still had the can-I-put-this-in-my-mouth look on her face and was pat-patting the small pile with her little hand.

I turned around from scouring the carpet and I saw that the baby was moving something around in her mouth with her tongue; her jaw shifting from one side to another as her gums relentlessly mashed whatever it was. My fingers fished out a brownish pebble sized mass.

Of course the only to do is to sniff it and hope for the best. I heaved a sigh as the whiff revealed it to be chocolate and not something much more offensive as I had initially feared. My son has a penchant for chocolate and this piece must have gotten away from him yesterday while he savored the treats that his Nana brought. Another day, another disaster averted.

Want Some Milk With Those Crayons?

The reason that I buy only Crayola crayons is simple: my son eats crayons. With all of the lead-ridden products coming out of China I can rest much easier knowing that my son is eating only crayons made in the USA. How he can stand to have all of that waxy goodness packed into the crevices of his teeth I’ll never know. Any time that he consumes something potentially bad for him I make him drink milk.

I have had to phone poison control twice since becoming a mother. The first time because the little guy picked up a philodendron leaf that one of the cats was chewing on and put it into his mouth. I’ve always been told that this particular plant is poisonous, so I called up the poison experts. According to the gentleman I spoke to philodendron leaves can’t kill you; but they can cause your mouth to become painfully inflamed. He told me to give my son milk.

The second time I called was because I accidentally brushed the boy’s teeth with my prescription toothpaste. (I actually wasn’t even sure that I had brushed his teeth with the wrong paste, but I thought I might have.) Since young children do not understand how spit out toothpaste, baby toothpaste contains no fluoride: it’s bad to swallow fluoride. I blamed the mishap on the fact that I was very pregnant and therefore delirious; his toothbrush and paste were even on a totally different shelf than my own. Anyway, the nurse felt that the small amount BoBeans had swallowed shouldn’t do him any harm, but told me to watch him for signs of disorientation and vomiting. She also suggested I make him drink some milk.

Apparently milk is the anti-poison. The next time your kid snatches the cleaning sponge and bites into it, finds an unidentifiable piece of something on the floor and puts it into his mouth, or adds crayon as the third course to his dinner just make him drink some milk. Milk: it does a body good.