You're Gonna Put It Where???

My oldest has (or rather had) tonsils the size of small limes so of course the surgeon said they needed to come out which placed us at the hospital last Wednesday. Liz was a trooper and handled everything with grace and dignity. . . .until we got home.

She threw up about 4 times in the recovery room but since she was still equipped with an IV the nurses gave her anti-nausea meds through that and she was none the wiser.
As we prepared to leave, one of the nurses handed me a little ziplock bag with a prescription label on it explaining, take this with you just in case she gets sick once you get home. Oh, how nice and considerate of them I think to myself, and I thank them as I shove the baggie in my purse without another thought. "Just wear gloves" one of the nurses recommended. Gloves? to give her a pill to swallow?? I was confused, but at the same time another nurse was handing me discharge instructions to sign and a third was taking out her IV and telling Chris to hold pressure on it so the confusion fluttered from my mind and flew away.

Until we got home.

Of course, not 5 minutes after we walk in the door she tosses her cookies in the hall bathroom and is looking a little putrid. Grammy wants to know if they wrote a prescription for her nausea. No I say, they were kind enough to send me home with a pill. So I run to get the little baggie from my purse and as I'm pouring a glass of juice my mother examines the packet and says,"Sweetie, you don't need juice. It's a suppository."

"Just wear gloves" is now making much more sense.

So I approach the miserable looking child and say, "Honey, I have some medicine for you that's going to make your tummy feel better. . . . .but it's a different kind of medicine than you usually take." I sit on the bed and begin to try and explain how this is going to work.

"YOU'RE GONNA PUT IT WHERE ?!!??!!?!!?"

I Lost My Tooth

Liz has had her first wiggly tooth for like 6 months, and she's the ONLY one in her ENTIRE class that hasn't lost a tooth yet and her tooth will NEVER fall out and she'll have baby teeth FOREVER...but finally, while eating an apple, it came out. She was very happy about this and immediately called every relative she could think of to share the news. Daddy came home from work and she met him at his car proudly displaying the large empty gap in her bottom jaw and her tooth which had been carefully sealed in a ziplock bag and lovingly placed in a hand sewn tooth fairy pillow.

And then she promptly lost the tooth.

Hand sewn tooth fairy pillow? check. Empty gap in teeth? check. Ziplock bag? check. Tooth? nope.

What follows is a transcript of the conversation that took place with her Grammy that evening.

"Grammy?" (tearfully)

"Yes, Sweetie?"

"I lost my tooth!" (sobbing now)

"I know, honey, you told me. That's wonderful! What do you think the tooth fairy will put under your pillow?"

"No, Grammy, I lost my tooth!"

"I know you did, I can see where it used to be."

"But Grammy, I LOST my tooth!!" (now approaching a wail)

(Grammy getting slightly confused) "OK, are you sad about losing your tooth?"

"Yes, I'M SAD!!! I LOST MY TOOTH!!! (now desolation, frustration and just a hint of anger)

"Alright. So tell me WHY you're sad."

"BECAUSE I LOST MY TOOTH! I lost it! I just lost it and the tooth fairy isn't going to give me any money because I lost my tooth!!"

"Honey, you're not making any sense. . ."

I'm sitting there watching this exchange thinking how simple it would be to remedy it with a slight vocabulary clarification: lost/misplaced. But it was just SO funny. And besides...my mother took my child out of an amusement park without telling me and I looked for them for an hour. So let's just say HER comfort level wasn't exactly top on my list at that moment in time.

Kids Are SO Literal

So I took Liz (who is 6) to the pediatrician to discuss her enlarged and frequently infected tonsils and long story short, he says we have to see an ENT. So we go to the ENT for a surgical consult to find out if he thinks we should have the tonsils removed. So we're sitting in the exam room (Liz is in this exam chair that looks a little like the chair at the dentist office but with more gadgets) and the nurse comes in and says hello and what-not-- making small talk (obviously the Doc is running behind schedule) and she asks the purpose of our visit. Liz informs her all about her "gi-normous" tonsils and that fact that she snores as loud as Daddy and it wakes up her sister. . . blah, blah, blah (the child can talk the ears off corn, ya know?)
So the nurse starts telling her that a tonsillectomy isn't that big a deal, it hurts a little but you get to eat lots of ice cream and slurpees and lay on the couch watching TV for a few days, etc. Then she leaves the room. I go back to reading my waiting room magazine and am very engrossed in an article (the contents of which I can no longer recall) when I hear a tiny little quivering voice:

"Mommy?"
"Yeah, sweetie, what's up?" I look up to see large tears threatening to spill over her big brown eyes, "Honey, what's wrong?"
"Is the doctor just gonna rip 'em out right NOW????"

Kids are SO literal.