Nothing Smaller Than Your Elbow

When I was a baby, pre-talking but able to move on my own, I stuck a pebble up my nose. My mom never let me forget it. She kept it for years up until she moved out of the house I grew up in when I was in my early twenties. She told everybody about it too. My friends, boyfriends, whoever she could and then she'd show it to them. Tell them about how I couldn't talk but kept yelling at the doctors and nurses, about how they almost had to slice open my "poor little nose", about how a sympathetic nurse made a last ditch effort and got it out.
It used to mortify me when she'd tell it too. That is until I learned how to ask, "Well I was one, how come someone wasn't watching me?" Then she'd stop picking on me and blame my dad.

Well, as of today, I have something to hold over my daughter's head for the next twenty years. Today I was reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone to my five year old daughter, and after she told me she was going to do a magic trick, I looked up from the book to find she had stuffed one of the beads from her jewelery making kit into her ear. I think she was going to make it appear from her ear like that quarter trick. She kind of missed the point.
Anyhow, she was trying to get it out for a few seconds before I realized what had happened, and it got pushed pretty far into her ear.
I freaked out and kept yelling at her not to touch anything. It was really up there and I was afraid to try anything and risk popping something. Of course it was noon and her Dr. was at lunch. The emergency room said I'd have an hour wait there anyhow so I should just hang out until her Dr. came back (It's at this point that I would like to point out that I live in a small town of around 20,000 people, and while the hospital does serve the next town over as well, they aren't much larger and I doubt I would have had to wait an hour unless it was just that the ER was on their lunch break).
At any rate, since I had to wait any how, I decided to give one thing a try. I took the straw from Girl's cup and stuck it near her ear canal and sucked. It didn't move the bead a lot, but it pulled it down enough that I could grab it with a tweezers without putting the tweezers into her ear canal.

And once again the day (and hundreds of dollars in medical expenses) is saved thanks to Super-mommy.

By the way, learning from my feelings about that stupid rock, I took a picture of the bead and then cleaned it off and put it back with her jewelery kit.


Notice the bead is a Y for Why would you stick this in your ear.