Help me decide what to blog about!

Would you like to read:

Option 1: How we said good-bye to binkies this weekend
Option 2: How I made my blog book
Option 3: How we thought Nate ate a plastic piece containing a sharp metal tack on Saturday night so mom and Nate got a special Mommy-Son Date Night at the ER?

I'm going to guess you chose Option 3.

Saturday night around 6:15, we were watching Dora the Explorer when Nate walked out of the living room into the playroom. Less than 3 minutes later, he walked back into the living room holding a window grill. Jon and I got off our butts in a hurry and were asking Nate where he got it when we both heard an extremely loud crunch come from Nate's mouth. We looked at the grill realized one of the pins was missing.

Panic, sheer panic.

I searched Nate's mouth and asked him over and over, "Did you eat it? Nate did you eat it?" Lesson #1: Nate clams up when you WANT him to talk incessantly. He stared at me with a sad face and after asking him 1587 times if he ate it, he repeated "Eat." WTF???

I packed a bag and headed off the ER with Nate while Jon ripped apart the playroom looking for the piece. When I showed them the piece at the ER, we were quickly escorted to triage. When Nate's oxygen levels came back normal, we were sent to the waiting room. Lesson #2: The ER during the peak of the worst flu season ever for North Carolina is SCARY.

Then we waited. For two hours. In the germiest room I could ever imagine. I'm about 99% certain Nate is going to end up with the flu because there were so so so many sick people there.

Lesson #3: Swallowing a metal pin is apparently not that big of an emergency. Lesson #4: Entertaining a toddler for 3 hours past his bedtime in a room full of crazy germs and very sick people is very hard. Lesson #5: People who are so sick that they have to be in the ER do NOT find it amusing when a toddler tries to play peek-a-boo with them and are NOT sympathetic when said toddler cries every 5-10 minutes because he is overtired and overstimulated. I was at my wit's end trying to keep Nate entertained for that long while also trying to prevent germ contact.

After two and a half hours, we finally got to go to a room and Nate got his torso X-rayed. You might say we came full circle because he was born in this same hospital. Shortly after birth, he had breathing problems so he was taken for a chest x-ray. Since they were the only patients in the NICU for the time they were there, his little chest x-ray stayed as the screensaver for one of the computers all week. Every time we'd enter and leave the NICU, I'd see his chest x-ray and think think think. How did they get him to hold still? Were his lungs going to be ok long-term? When we would he get out of his incubator?

I wish I could have told the worrying NICU Laura that 21 months in her future, her son would be such a completely normal toddler that she would be back here when he possibly ate a foreign object. But it's probably for the best I can't talk to her because I would also have to tell her she would be even more worried he might die.
The x-ray came back fine and it appears he did not eat the pin. We had to talk to three more people to get discharged so in the meantime, we sat watching Noggin in a private room. We finally got home around 10PM and Nate was completely loopy from being up so far past his bedtime.

For obvious reasons, I did not bring a camera with me but once we knew everything was ok, I snapped this quick pic with my camera phone. I had to document this milestone - first trip to ER for ingesting a foreign object. (PS. Yes I made the glove balloon. A mom's got to do what a mom's got to do.)