7/22

Well finally it happened. One of the boys did something that I'm sure every kid in the world does at some point in their lives. Honestly though if you'd have asked me which kid would be the first one to stick something in his ear and not be able to get it out I would have said Zachary. I would have been wrong. It was Noah.

I was in the kitchen doing the dishes and the kids were in the living room watching tv with their afternoon snack. All of a sudden Noah comes running into the kitchen screaming. He's screaming and crying so hard I can't figure out what he's saying. So after a few minutes he calms down enough that I can figure out he's saying something is stuck in his ear. I take a look and at first thought he'd somehow broke a piece of wood off in his ear. I figure its sticking out far enough that I can just grab it with my fingers. No I couldn't and I pushed it further back. Now Don always accuses me of overreacting so I decide I'm going to stay calm. I ask Noah what is in his ear so I can decide the next course of action. Noah doesn't answer because he's back to screaming again. I ask Nathan if he knows. 20 minutes later after a full recap of everything that Noah has done in the 5 minutes after I left the living room and the time Noah comes screaming into the kitchen I find out that Noah shoved a chow mein noodle in his ear.

I call Don calmly at work and tell him Noah shoved something in his ear. I ask him if he thinks we can get it out or if we need to take him to the doctor. He says he'll come home right now since its only 20 minutes before he's off anyway. It takes him about 15 minutes to get home and once he arrives he decides that we should flood the ear with water so the noodle will fall apart. So I make him a bowl with water and give him the syringe. Don then says to me, "Maybe you should call the doctor's office to be sure this is okay." So I call and talk to the nurse. She says he needs to come in because he's still young and we don't know how long the item is. So off we head to the doctor.

Noah falls asleep on the way over which is good because he's been screaming for about 45-60 minutes now. As we head into the office he's calmed down and all excited to go play in the play area. He heads right in and talks to the first person he sees. He calmly tells them, "Hi I'm Noah and I have a noodle in my ear." So now to end this extremely long recount of this story we wait 45 minutes to see the doctor who takes 30 seconds to pull the noodle out of his ear. And what does the doctor say? On something like that you could just flood the ear and let it dissolve.