A Popcorn Kernel Up the Nose

Trauma of traumas my little girl is certainly a curious and precocious child. We popped popcorn tonight. Not the big bags, but the small snack size. The kind that you have to basically have psychic powers or at the very least X-Ray vision to see into the bag and divine whether or not the popcorn is at it's height of popcorn deliciousness. I stand next to the microwave worrying about the cancer it might me causing me by standing this close and counting in my head between popping kernel sounds One...One One...One One Thousan.... The science of not over cooking those bags is a fine art. Why the popcorn makers can't figure out an exact time for the small bags is beyond me. But all that's besides the point.

I had a premonition I must admit as I looked at a popcorn kernel sitting in it's unfulfilled glory atop one of the fluffy popcorn in my daughter's bowl. I distinctly remember thinking I hope she doesn't try to taste that. It could burn her mouth or she could choke on it. Of course being me means any number of these thoughts on a variety of potential calamities flit through my mind hundreds of times a day. I'm sure there is a clinical term for what this is but I haven't gone to see a shrink just yet.

Who would have guessed that that blasted kernel, or one of it's deficient siblings would make it's dastardly presence known not in my daughter's mouth, but up her nostril? Certainly not me and I'll tell you what my exact thought was when she turned and looked up at me and said in a small scared voice, "Mom, I put a seed up my nose and now it's stuck,"...my first thought was You got this from your father's side. You can imagine the tailspin my wild paranoid thoughts went into when I confirmed that a golden kernel had indeed found it's way up my baby's nose. Images of cornstalks growing out my daughter's nose filled my head. I imagined how she' be called The Corn Girl of Michigan Avenue and people would come near and far to gape. "So...you've come to stare at the beast have you?"

When I was gestating this little child inside of myself my biggest hope for her was that she would inherit good genes from both sides of the family. My mantra almost daily was, "Don't let her get my feet or my nose...don't let her get my feet or my nose...." For those of you who have seen my feet, well I won't dwell on God's unkindness, but let's just say my toes are of the short and stout variety and none of them like to take the lead role. Which makes them, to put it bluntly - square. Fine. I can tuck them away in my wide width shoes and shield them from the glare of prying eyes. But my nose....

Why couldn't I have been born with smaller nostrils? A petite probuscis? Turns out my ancestors had proud noses. Noses that could win races in a photo finish. Who am I to turn up my snout at their genetically well endowed gift of a nose? I may not go out and get a nose job, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. The ironic thing in all this is the first time I laid eyes on my daughter I knew that she had my nose, or the beginnings of my nose. And as I counted her ten fingers and ten toes I also knew she had gotten my feet as well. C'est la vie. I loved her all the more for it.

Turns out in the end her bigger nostrils had an advantage. It made it easier for my husband to pull the kernel out with a pair of tweezers with only a few tears shed. I'm going to write this down in a book I keep for her, so she can be proud of her nose...along with how she told me last week that she had magma in her eye when she really meant schmegma!