Two More Reasons Why Parenting Is Not for the Faint of Heart

Reason One
The other evening Acadia, age 2, and Gannon, age 4, were in the living room watching tv and eating popcorn. (Yes, I am sure the AAP would say giving popcorn to a two year old is not a good idea. I would now tend to agree with them.) I was in the kitchen fixing my own snack and when I returned to the living room I saw that Acadia, who had a cold, looked like she needed a tissue. I tried to wipe her nose, but wondered why it wasn’t coming clean…and why was her nose so hard? Looking at the kleenex I saw that I’d wiped two popcorn kernels off her nose.

You can imagine the thoughts that went thought my head at this point.

“Cadie, did you put popcorn in your nose?” was the dumb question I asked her.
“Ha ha, me,” was her reply (this is how she admits to wrongdoing).
“Are there more up there?”
“Yeah.”
“Acadia, you do NOT put things in your nose!”
“Wah-ree,” she apologized nasally.

I called her doctor’s office. The fact that the nurse immediately had an answer for this dilemma reassured me more than a little bit. I was pretty sure she was not going to call child protective services. I was told to lay her down on her back, place my mouth over hers, and blow. So I did. Repeatedly. One by one, at least eight snot-covered corn kernels were jettisoned from her nostrils, colliding with my left cheek.

As more and more emerged, and while I was wiping myself off, I asked my son, “Did you see her doing this?”
Gannon said, “Heh heh, yeah!”
Apparently it had been entertaining to him.

Eventually I pretended to convince myself there couldn’t possibly be any more up there, and sent her to bed. Actually, before doing that, I checked once more with a flashlight. Ugh, there was one more. Lay her down, blow, wipe, comfort kid who is really sick of this whole blowing thing by now. The mom was pretty tired of it too.

If I were either a really cool mom or a great writer, I would apply some spiritual principle to this event, like use it as a sort of object lesson on getting rid of hidden sins or something. But I’ll just leave that part up to you people who are more inclined than I to do things like that, and instead remind my readers that this sort of thing happens on a fairly regular basis in households across the country. Implying, of course, that I am not a bad parent because I have a kid who does this, and neither are you.

Reason Two
I guess this one is a bit more sobering. The kids and I discovered a home video of Gannon, age 1. They’ve been watching it every chance they get. At one point there’s a video of an ultrasound picture, and my voice telling the camera how it’s our new baby. When he saw that, Gannon said, “That’s Acadia!”

But it wasn’t Acadia, as you’d figure out if you did the math. It was Levi, the baby boy we lost at almost 18 weeks gestation in 2003. I’ve told Gannon about Levi, but that was a log time ago. I don’t think it’s been even since Acadia was born, so he probably doesn’t even remember. So I had to decide what to do.

What would you have done? Just let it go? Agreed with him? Explained the whole thing, got out the pictures, etc?

The first time he said it (we’ve watched this video many times now) I said, “Yeah, Acadia looked just like that,” or something to that effect. Didn’t agree with him really, but sounded enough like I was agreeing so that he was satisfied. But I felt like I was being dishonest. I don’t want my kids not to know about Levi, and to find out at some later date and be all shocked or whatever.

So the next time I told him that no, it wasn’t Acadia, but it was a baby boy. I hoped he’d let it go. Of course he didn’t (this is Gannon we’re talking about; he never lets anything go till he thinks he understands it), so I told him little by little till he had enough information. I ended up telling him that Levi was a baby who would have been his little brother, but he died before he was born, and it all happened when Gannon was 1 year old. I know he doesn’t fully comprehend all of that, but we’ll visit the topic again, and I guess that’s how we learn all of the big stuff.

So yeah, not for the faint of heart.