Raising Roan

I wonder if all parents look ahead at times to those developmental milestones of a more dreaded nature and through some sort of built-in denial/wishful thinking mechanism, cross their fingers and effectively convince themselves that by some stroke of karmic luck or genius parenting their child will be different and spare his parents a bit of torment, fear, or general annoyance. Maybe he’ll just skip that phase. Maybe he won’t be a biter…a hitter… an up-the-nose-with-an-object shover-upper. And then that day arrives when you no longer shoot dirty looks at those horribly deficient and negligent parents whose two-year old dared push and shove your precious, bewildered, evil-free one-year old on the playground. Or when you find yourself driving your two-year old to the doctor to have one of the little rubber feet from under your answering machine extracted from the upper depths of his nose. Roan, God bless him, is still sweet enough to immediately confess his mischief. The first time he figured out how to remove the rubber feet, he brought them to me like a dog happily brings you a dead squirrel. I said to myself, “no, he won’t put those up his nose,” and I shoved them back into the machine. About ten minutes later, he came running to me with only one rubber foot, and when I turned the machine upside down, I saw the other foot missing. “Hmmm,” I said to myself. I looked hard at him. “Oh well, it’s just lost.” But then he started to complain, “boogy, mama, boogy” (his word for booger), and he started sneezing. I used a flashlight to look up his nose. Didn’t see anything. Clean as a whistle. Hmmm. I tapped both sides of his nose. Do they always feel this hard? I tapped my own. That wasn’t helpful. Hmmm. Twenty minutes later – “boogy, mama, boogy.” This time, I laid him upside down in the brightest light coming through the window, shined the flashlight yet again, and sure enough – there it was – a little black rubber foot effectively wedged almost beyond my sight and definitely beyond my finger’s reach. But the ends of my tweezers seemed too sharp to stick up there. For a moment, I experienced the panic of the new mom – Ahh, he’s going to need surgery! And who knows what else is up there in the nether regions of his sinus cavities! I asked him, “do we need to go see Dr. Gopal?” “Yes, Dr. Gopal,” he said. He wasn’t worried. He sat peacefully in the car, whistling through his nose. He could see I was stressed. He actually said, “poor mama” (where did he learn to say that?). As always, he was super cooperative for the doctor. As usual, fascinated with anything medical. Anyway, it was truly no big deal. Just another initiation into the parenting club.