The title for this post is a reference to an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond. The scenario posed was this: a child shoves Cocoa Puffs up his nose – what do you do? Some answers: tweezers (wrong), trip to the ER (wrong) – the answer is simply – one does the crunch and blow. Now you might wonder what in the world this has to do with anything. I wouldn’t set you up like this without a payoff.
Lunchtime, today. I am going back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room with food for Quincy. He was about half way done with his food and things were going as normal. Then the curious toddler emerged. Here is how I surmised this little event played out in Quincy’s mind.
“Man, these raisins are really yummy. I’m glad dad gave me so many to eat ’cause I could eat ’em all day. Hey, wait a sec. . . I have so many . . . so many that I can spare some to play with.
Turns out that I would probably not have noticed for a long time had he not said something. I believe he said: “Dad, I have raisin in my nose.” I’m not kidding. I just looked at him and thought he was kidding, but when I got closer, sure enough, I could see the raisin jammed up there. So, my first thought was from the TV show about crunch and blow, but you can’t do that with a raisin. Well, turns out if you spin a kid by the ankles thru the air at about 25mph, then stuff will just fly out the nose. Okay, that’s not what happened. The extraction was very simple.
I pushed my finger against the open nostril and told Quincy to blow. It took him about 4 blows and the raisin was expelled. So, instead of the crunch and blow, we used the squeeze and blow. Ah, he used to be so trustworthy to eat without direct supervision 100% of the time – no longer when small items are involved. Now if you will excuse me, Quincy appears to have other food items crammed in his ears . . . .