Oh the Curiosity

We are back home now, and I am going to try to catch up on the blog. It might take a while and a whole a lot of posts :-) 

John is getting really good at feeding himself! He can use a spoon and a fork, and supervised he can use a regular cup. He is a pretty great eater. One night he was loving eating all the corn that we would give him. Seth was doing the dishes and I was trying to clean up and I turned around for one moment. When I faced John again, I saw him stuffing corn up his left nostril! Thankfully he was only working on the second one when I saw it. I easily got the second piece of corn out, but the first piece of corn was away farther up there! 

I tried to laugh it off and not panic, we all could see the humor in it, but we also felt some concern and knew it was very important to get this thing out! My mom tried to help us as we attempted everything we could think of to get that corn out safely. We tried to get it out with tweezers, and John really was not a big fan about that. We tried and tried, and then we decided that we would have to take him into the emergency room to have them get it out. 

But just as we were getting ready, the thought popped into my mind that if we had a little vacuum we could stick it up his nose and maybe we could get the corn out. It was kind of a joke, but then my mom thought of the brilliant idea of using baby nose aspirator to try to get it out because that's meant for sucking things out of babies' noses. So Seth went to two pharmacies to try to find one. John was so excited to go outside, that he was terribly disappointed when he found out that we weren't going to go in the car right away, so since we were all bundled up, I took John down the street for a walk to see all the Christmas lights. He loved it! He didn't seem very bothered by the corn, although every once in a while, he would point to his nose and say something like "corn" or "owie."

When Seth returned, we put 'Frozen,' John's favorite movie, on and tried to suck the corn out of his nose with the aspirator. We tried and tried to, but no luck. John absolutely hated the aspirator, and we had to really wrestle him to get him still enough to stick it in, but we didn't want to hurt him or stick it up too far while he was thrashing.

Then my dad had a stroke of genius! He had looked up on YouTube how to get something small out of a kid's nose. He found a video that showed parents doing something that looked similar to CPR on their kid to get something out of his nose. They closed The empty nostril with their hand, and then blew into the child's mouth, and whatever was in there flew out!

It looked kind of strange, but we were willing to try it to avoid an emergency room visit. Seth never kisses John on the mouth. He thinks it's really weird for parents to get his kids on the mouth, so you could say this was John and Seth's first kiss on the mouth :-) but Seth would never claim it.

I held John, while Seth tried the maneuver. It seems like a great idea, but Seth said that there was just air coming out of John's knows when he would blow into his mouth. 

We were losing hope, and it was getting very late. And then I thought that we should pray and ask God to help us so that we could get it out and so John could sleep. We tried the aspirator again, but it didn't work and it seemed to push the corn out farther in his nose. We couldn't even see it anymore. But Seth decided to try the blowing technique again, and it worked! The corn flew out of his nose just like that!

Apparently, the aspirator did push the car and I'm further so that it would completely blocked John's nasal passage, so then the maneuver would work to push it out. It was truly amazing to me, that we are able to get it out after we had done all that we could do, and we prayed for God's help. God heard our prayer, and he helped us. I know he cares about us, and he cares about our son, even in the little things like when our son sticks corn up his nose :-)

Surprisingly, John didn't mind the CPR technique very much. He thought it was mildly interesting. The patient was very patient.

To all those parents out there who have exceedingly curious toddlers, try these methods, and you may have some luck :-)