Yuck

Well, perhaps the age old adage holds true... pride goes before a fall. I don't know that I was exactly proud, but I did have a certain sense of satisfaction that Emily never got into anything as a baby, toddler, or preschooler. So it was with great consternation that I had to make my first call to Poison Control. The irony is that it wasn't that long ago that I posted our first poison control sticker by the phone. I saw them at work and it seemed like a good thing to have, just in case. It was the classic green yuck sticker and Emily hated it. For some reason that face just gave her the heebie-jeebies. After three days of listening to her implore us to take it down and many promises not to eat anything bad or let her friends eat anything bad, we replaced it with a more discreet plain sticker that is under the phone base, out of site. By the way, I didn't actually make the call. It was made by proxy through my dear husband. Here's how the events unfolded.

As I mentioned in my last post, the girls and I traveled to Ecuador, to visit my parents. It was a great trip, and fun to experience parts of my childhood through Emily's eyes. Anyway, one day Emily and Katrina were outside playing. I was  doing something, laundry I think, when my Mom says, "You better come, Katrina ate something". She fished some of it out of her mouth, but she had swallowed most of some strange tomatoish thing growing in my parents front yard. Oh great. Here I am in a foreign country, how am I going to figure out what it is that she swallowed and if it's going to kill her? She was acting fine, happy as a clam, so I turned to tracking down Emily to see if I could get to the bottom of what happened. After much reassuring that she wasn't in trouble, Emily finally confessed that she had given the fruit to Katrina to eat because she thought it was a tomato. On a side note, Christoph and I have been noticing a trend recently. Emily likes to use Katrina as her guinea pig in all kinds of ways. So, not knowing what else to do I call Christoph (waking him out of a dead sleep) and ask him to call Poison Control. They weren't much help. They advised taking the plant to our local nursery for identification purposes and then calling them back. They did reassure us that with most poisonous plants you have to consume large quantities to produce any ill effects, so one small fruit would not likely harm her even if it were poisonous. They advised to watch for vomiting, diarrhea, and unusual sleepiness. She acted perfectly normal for the rest of the day, so I'm guessing it wasn't poisonous. I did sternly tell Emily she must never feed herself or Katrina anything without first checking with someone. I will confess however that as I was going to sleep that night my active imagination couldn't help but summon up some images of Katrina not waking up in the morning. It took me a while to fall asleep and all my willpower not to go into her room to make sure she was still breathing. Here's to firsts in parenting, and to hopefully never having to call poison control again.