Up your nose with a rubber hose

I’m not one for lists. I take that back. I love lists when I’m trying to organize my life. All over my house, lists upon lists. The home improvement list has just joined my collection of lists most recently, and it gives me great pleasure to add to it, review it and imagine my home once all projects are completed. It will no doubt be a source of motivation for a long time to come given the state of this house. I am not, however, a great composer of lists on this blog. Perhaps I’m all listed out once I come to write. Perhaps I’m unsure that you will find any of my lists to be inspiring or of interest. Perhaps I should compile a list of all the reasons I don’t tend to compose lists for your reading pleasure. Or, I could just throw caution to the wind and do it.

Without further delay, I offer to you my first list. The Up-The-Nose-List. Here is a list of all the items which children have shoved up noses as relayed to me by teachers, parents or adults who were the actual offenders themselves...as children, of course.

* A pebble
* A bead
* A crayon-colour unknown
* A plastic army soldier like the ones in Toy Story in its entirety
* A Lincoln Log. OUCH!

Asher models a Lincoln Log for those of you who are unfamiliar. As far as I'm aware, he has not shoved a Lincoln Log up his own nose.


* I have two examples in the collection department:

1. One child ended up in hospital after it was discovered that she had been storing bits of fuzz from her secruity blanket inside her nose over a few months time. It was a strange odour that tipped off parents to the violated nostril. ew.

2. Another child also collected the cotton fibrefill pills off her fuzzy pillow up her shnoz. The thought of blocking my own nasal passages and inhibiting the intake of fresh air makes me gasp for air like a fish out of water, and I have an uncontrollable urge to blow my nose.

* When my pediatrician father had to bring my sister into his office after hours so that he could take a long, large instrument to her nose, he asked her how the button got so far up there. “It bounced!” answered my sister. Poor Rachel. The story never gets old.

* A friend’s Facebook status revealed to me recently that her toddler had shoved a blueberry waaaay up her nose. She chose to take her to the Emergency Room rather than try to blow it out of her via her mouth. Good choice, but I can’t help but laugh at the image of expelling a blueberry by blowing into a kid's mouth.


Might you have an Up-The-Nose story? Just noses please. Yes, we should just pick noses... While I was offered a couple of In-The-Ear stories, they just weren’t as amusing. There’s something especially comical about imagining both the act of nose packing and the misshapen nostril that has been stretched by fingers and objects. And I don’t think we need to discuss anything that got stuck in other orifices. I’m sure those stories would be welcome on other kinds of blogs.