this is a sentence i fear i will hear very often.
i can expect sentences such as these to happen some times in life but i don't like having them repeated in the proximity of a month and a half.
i don't like texting my friend who is a pediatric nurse, 'hey, we're back at children's.. wanna chat?'
but then i don't seem to be consulted by el guapo travieso. that's right, the handsome menace.
back in november when the first childless meal was interrupted by a phone call regarding a hysterical child with an embedded tick should have been a clue that we're just not allowed to have fun.
fast forward two months later we try to have fun with kids in tow only to have el guapo bite and ingest the tine of a trident that was used to hold my burger together.
a cry. a fruitless finger swipe by mom. a chortling cough. giggles and smiles.
he swallowed it.
you can imagine how the fun evening with friends came to a grinding halt; flash an imaginative glance around to me standing outside in 7 degree weather talking the the triage nurse at children's praying that we could escape a giant copay this time.
we couldn't.
the manager was a wreck. completely at a loss of how to help but he was so kind to find out that the plastic pitchfork was not made of anything toxic and to plead with us to keep him posted.
he was more nervous that we were.
we did have to go to children's but only to make sure that the pointy object had gone down the throat and there was no risk of aspiration.
it did and there wasn't.
considering he's been trying to ingest everything that is made of wood, plastic, tar, rubber, steel, rock, etc since he could use the pincher motion i'm rather surprised it took 17 months.
if plastic tridents tasted like chicken burger restaurants wouldn't be such a problem.
trident tines don't necessarily trigger one to add poison control to one's telephone contact list but other things do.
around 18 months of age little boys grow go go gadget arms.
being the mother of el guapo travieso you learn to listen for small sounds.
sounds like soft foot steps and the quick repeat of the work 'eh.'
the mother of el guapo travieso finds him walking towards her calmly but with alarmed eyes carrying a lit candle covered from eyebrow to chest on the right side with deep red wax.
yes. he tried to drink the wax or investigate it and managed to not light his hair on fire or put out the flame.
the only thing i learned from the movie 'bend it like b*ckhem' was to never pull a possibly adhered material from burnt skin (so the entire hour plus of that move wasn't a complete waste.)
a little olive oil and a warm wet rag and el guapo was back to normal.
apparently wax cools very quickly but if i really think about that it's something i already knew...
from experience.
my current experience did not end quite so quickly as, judging from the wax retainer i pulled from the top of his mouth, i thought, and the pediatrician's nurse thought, we should call poison control and check the materials.
it turns out a y*nkee christmas wreath candle will not kill you. but it might give you a belly ache.
in summation.
if you think a dangerous object is high enough, put it higher.
no height is high enough.
why?
because the space of time it takes to do the lunch dishes is all it takes for a certain boy to climb onto the dining room table.
so the state of my house is reflective or my circumstance. mantra: stop, listen, look, intervene.
never under estimate the reach of el guapo travieso.
