Some kind of fascination??????

This is slightly old news in our household now, although it relates to New Years Eve.

Due to a few things happening at the farm, we decided to hold a bit of a NYE bash for a modest amount of people. Even though it was BYO meat and grog, I still needed to organise salads, bread, utensils, odds and ends, ice, tables, clean up to the calf shed....... I also became the proud owner of an iPod Classic for Christmas, courtesy of my lovely husband, and as such, we decided to use this as the source of music for the eveneing as I also got one of those docking stations. Problem was, I really didn't have a clue as to how to get music on there.

So come 2.30pm, I am sitting in front of the computer downloading songs from my pitiful array of CDs. After being in bed for only 1/2hr, young Master Tom appears at the office door saying he needs to blow his nose. I grump at him, throw him a tissue and he goes back to bed. At about 5.30pm I decide that he'd better get up, although a late sleep was fine as he was going to be up late that night. I go into his room to find him crying on the bed saying that he had something up his nose.

Alarm bells start ringing inside my head as this is not the first instance of a foreign object up his nasal passage. So I get a tissue and get him to blow really REALLY hard. Nothing. And it sounds blocked to me. So I go get the torch. With him bent backwards and me peering as intently as I could, I just caught a glimpse of something green. Dark green, not snot green. On questioning him what it was that was lodged up there, he quite cheerfully tells me that he bit the end off the T-Rex's tail and stuck it up his nose!!! Why? I ask you....

A bit of background for those new to my son's nose mining adventures...... The week before his 2nd birthday, he went through a phase of sticking things up his nose - sultanas, cheese, ham, chewed up bits of tissue - however, I always managed to get them out either by getting him to blow, or by extraction with the tweezers. The day before his birthday, I noticed that the mucus that was constantly running out of his nose was luminious green in colour and smelt like something that should have been buried for a long time. As we were going shopping for party supplies, I decided against taking him to the doctor. But the smell was so rotten, that on arrival home, I rang and got an appointment the next day (his birthday) to see the doctor.

On seeing the doctor, Tom makes a screaming run for the door. As a result, we had to take him to the hospital and the doctor had to take him into theatre to remove it under general anaesthetic. It turned out to be the chewed up top of a sultana box. What a way to spend your birthday!

Ok, back to 2008. So based on previous experience, I waste no time in taking him into A&E to get someone more adept than me with tweezers to dislodge ol' T-Rex's tail. As it turns out, one of the registrars was on call and whilst I wouldn't want to say anything negative, my personal thoughts were that all he succeeded in doing was to push it further up Tom's nose. He did try to get it while Tom's was under a twilight sedation, but no go. So he called in his supervisor.....who just happened to be the same doctor that took the sultana box out 1.5 years ago!! He also tried while Tom was under a twilight, but the thing was so far up that he didn't want to knock it into his airway which was unprotected at that time. So, once again, we bundled the lad off to surgery to unblock his snozz. It is about 8pm by now and the party is in full swing.

And success! After 10 minutes in theatre, Ian comes out to say that everything is ok, and obviously thinking that I'll be back here again in the future, tells me he'll see me next time!!!!



Tom waiting for theatre with "Dr Bear" - the teddy the nurses gave him in A&E

By the time he'd recovered from his drugs, we finally got home just before 9.45pm. And just like kids are, his feet hit the ground out of the car and he was screaming around with the other kids having a wonderful time playing chasey and jumping on the trampoline (albeit a little unsteady). He lasted about 45 minutes and went to bed. The guests at the party thought it was very funny that I missed Christmas 2007 because of one child and I was potentially going to miss NYE 2008 because of another.

Bret (my uncle) found all this extremely amusing and took to calling Tom, "Nostrasaurus: the evil nosed dinosaur".