A Rolling Stone Gathers No...Snot!?!

So I go to pick up my children at my mother's after work on Thursday. Cohen is playing on the lawn, but Saul is nowhere to be found. And why is that, you may be wondering. Well, that is because he woke up from his nap crying, "There's a rock in my nose, Grampie!" And indeed, there was. Stuck up there pretty good, too. So Grampie, being a nurse, whips out his mini forceps and makes an attempt at extraction. A valiant but vain attempt after which he calls Roger and asks him to meet them at the hospital with Saul's medicare card. Which is where they were when I arrived at mom's.

Normally, this is were the mildy-interesting-but-not-too-unual-for-a-two-and-a-half-year-old-boy story would end. However, this story is not normal. For it seems, when the doctor extracted the large-for-a-nose stone from Saul's nostril, the tale took an interesting twist. [Picture this in slow motion, perhaps with Chevy Chase as the father.] The stone comes out, and with a flick of the doctor's wrist, flys up in the air, does a somersault, and plunges into the open, screaming mouth of my son, who promptly stops crying and swallows it. True story.

And it would have been funny enough had it ended there. But it did not. No, no, the saga continued at home where Saul, standing in the middle of the living room, watching Dora, begins to sneeze. Achoo! Plink. Achoo! Plink. Yes, you guessed it, more rocks. So now, the burning question is: Are there any more? Will they come out on their own or is Saul Abali destined to live the rest of his life with literal rocks in his head? I thought a logical solution would be to make him sneeze again. And how better to make someone sneeze than by having them snort pepper up their nose. Roger disagreed and said this was only an old wives' tale. My father (the nurse) upon consultation, agreed with my pepper plan. Roger disagreed once more and said the pepper would burn Saul's nose. (Because having 3 or more rocks lodged in your nostril doesn't cause any discomfort whatsoever.) So, I sacrificed my own well-being (what won't a mother do for her young) and snuffed some pepper up my own nose before trying it out on Saul. The result: I sneezed for the rest of the evening and Saul went happily to bed that night without sneezing at all and with whatever more he had shoved into his nasal cavity still there.

And the moral of the story is: What goes in, must come out...although not always from the same place.