Let Go The Lego

I love kids when they're stupid and silly. Elise is four and a half years old; she goes by the nickname of Xinxin (like shing-shing). Yesterday, when her mom asked what she was so busily doing upstairs, she said that she was cleaning. Curious how Xinxin would 'clean,' her mom walked upstairs to check. She found her daughter in the bathroom, surrounded by bloody tissues and Legos. Alarmed, she asked a very frantic and busy-looking Xinxin what was going on. Her story is that she was playing with her Legos and picked one up "to smell." But "smelling" the Lego caused it to be lodged in her nostril. So she picked at her nose to pull it out. She kept picking and picking and her nose started bleeding, yet the Lego piece wouldn't come out. It went on for so long that she started wondering if perhaps the Lego wasn't in her nose but had actually dropped on the floor, so she started looking for the Lego piece all over the room, but couldn't find it anywhere. Did she drop it? Should she keep picking her nose? And was it ok to freak out? Elise was confused and a little frightened.

After some calls to the doctor and her dad at work and a little while later, Xinxin was in the emergency room. The hospital setting seemed to have calmed her down drastically for she was very cheerful and giggly her whole time there. Her nose was too little for the films to determine whether there really was a Lego piece stuck far up her nose so the doctors had to try something novel: they blocked out Xinxin's free nostril and told Xinxin's mom that she had to cover Xinxin's mouth with her own mouth, completely, and blow very hard into Xinxin's mouth. The nurses were told not to laugh at the sight of Xinxin's mother giving her a mouth-to-mouth. Alas, those doctors don't spend all those years in school for nothing. A couple of blows later, the Lego piece that Xinxin really did apparently 'sniff' up her nose popped right out.

Be careful, gentle readers, the next time you take time to smell the roses.