A week?! I went a whole week?

Well, we did have a lot going on.  I'll start with the most dramatic.

Last week Wednesday, my kids and their friends from next door were breaking apart a hunk of styrafoam, which is no big deal.  It's a mess they get to make as a treat because it vacuums up easily.  Will wanted to take a couple of the big pieces in the tub and we didn't see anything wrong with that.  If it made a mess it made a mess.  We could always give him a colander and have him skim the pieces all out.

He did break some pieces off, as we anticipated.  What we did not anticipate was his shoving the pieces into his ears.  When Scott exclaimed that Will needed to get those out of his ears, Will stuck his pinky fingers in to shove the stuff in farther. Oh yay!

Next morning, off to the doctor we go!  The really fun part was that I'd just been there the day before so Zoe could have a check up, I was back less than 24 hours later!  Yee haw!

Our regular doctor in the group is a wonderful Indian woman who's great with the kids and doesn't speak to me condescendingly or make me feel like I'm wasting her time.  She took a look in my son's ears and said that he did indeed have stuff in both his ears that needed to come out. 

Then came one of those really fun mom moments when I had to climb up on the exam table to hold my son with my legs around his legs while pinning his arms to his sides.  Even so, he moved around too much for the doctor to get the long tweezers in to pull the foreign debris out.  Next, she had the nurse flush his ears but since the styrafoam doesn't absorb water, it didn't budge.    We had to go see an ear, nose and throat specialist. 

Our doctor made the arrangements for Will to go in to the ENT's later that afternoon.  I made Will go to preschool, which he claimed was totally unfair. Then I called Scott to tell him that we had to go to another appointment and would he be able to come with us please?

 I made phone calls until I found someone who would be able to pick Zoe up from school and babysit until we got home. 

Scott and I took him to the ENT, a very nice guy who checked out the situation and took us to another room with a bright light and a microscope viewer that would allow him to see what he was doing without having to peer through an eye-o-ear-o-nose-o-scope. 

And Will wriggled around so much the doctor couldn't get the stuff out.  He turned to us and said "Well, we've got two options.  There's velcro, which means we can get this taken care of today for the price of admission.  Or, there's general anesthesia which means a couple of days and an increase in costs of about three thousand dollars."  We opted for velcro.

It's still called a papoose board, a padded board about eight inches wide with very wide padded straps that are wrapped around a person and velcroed into place.  It makes one look like a bundled baby but it doesn't come undone.

So, my son got strapped down and a woman held his head still while the doctor pulled hunks of styrafoam the size of pencil erasers out of each ear.  And he screamed.  I'm sure it echoed down the hallway, frightening kids and making parents shake their heads wondering who's horrid child was making that ungodly noise. 

The plus side is that it was over inside of five minutes and my child had recovered by the time we got back to the waiting room.  The ENT also told us that leaving that in there would have been really bad and getting the hunks out inside of a day had saved us a great deal of heartache.  He also confessed that his main concern with restraining children is really the parents. 

After we got into the car we agreed that Will had earned a donut.  Then what did the kid pick?  Dunkin' Donuts.  Not Krispy Kreme, but Dunkin'.  I indulged this request, even though I disagreed with the location. 


I am really hoping we can get through this week without any foreign objects winding up in any of my children's various, oh what word to use, orifices?  Oh you know what I mean!

Amanda's beauty tip of the day:  If you are going to be spending a lot of time in the pool over the summer and do your own hair color, you might think about skipping the color treatment just for the swimming season.  You'll have to do your hair about twice as often and the chlorine will make it very dry.  Skipping color treatments for the summer will save you some damage.