Paying Closer Attention To Children

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me she had to take her son to the doctor’s. A few days earlier he told her he had a bit of pain in his ear but she looked and saw nothing and assumed he was just goofing around. Two nights ago, she felt the urge to check his ear with a flashlight and realized that there was indeed something hiding in there. After several attempts to get it out unsuccessfully, she decided to take him in to the hospital yesterday and thank God she did as the doctor helped pull out the obstruction in the ear. Apparently, she bought a new freezer over the weekend and after unpacking it, her son was playing around with the white foamy package thingy that came with it. She, of course, immediately took it off him when she noticed, but I suppose by then he had torn of a part of it and stuffed it into his ears. (rolling my eyes @ these shidrens). 

 

It reminds me of my experience with my son shortly after I had my daughter. I noticed he was rubbing his nostril in a weird way and so I called him and looked into it. Lo and behold, I noticed something stuffed deep inside his nose which was clearly making him very uncomfortable. I almost fainted in shock not to talk of my rampaging hormones! Between my hubby, our friend Tony and me, we tried unsuccessfully to get the strange item out of his nose. I started crying because a trip to the ER was the last thing I wanted that day (I would need to do another post for you to understand why, lol), and it seemed almost inevitable. Then I recalled a trick I used to get him to blow his nose while giving him a bath, tried it and it worked! The stuff slid out of his nostril slowly till we could reach it to pull it out. It turned out to be a corner piece from a front cover of a University brochure we had lying in the living room. He had torn the bit off, rolled it and inserted it into his nose!!! He sat there with a sheepish grin on his face afterwards, blissfully unaware of the panic he had created.

Bless the cheeky bugger. :)

The thing is that with toddlers, you can’t do enough. It is an ongoing process to ensure their safety so we must be at alert always. By “we”, I mean the parents, uncles, aunties, grannies, friends and everyone around any toddler.  We need to be more sensitive to their whims and needs and try our best to pay better attention to them however overwhelmed we might be. I did also engaged in my fair share of pranks while growing up as I wrote about a bit of that here.

Sigh. Can you relate?

The point of this post is to remind all adults to always pay better attention to kids. The reason I decided to write is because of a creepy video I came across yesterday. A little girl told her mum she felt some movements in her mouth and after checking and not seeing anything, the mother thought it was nothing serious and that perhaps the 10-year-old girl was joking. After the girl became unusually persistent, the mother took her to a dentist who then found out that the girl had a rare case of oral myiasis which is a maggot infection whereby fly-lava-maggots grows in living beings. *Shudders*.

If you have the stomach for it, check out the video after the cut below.

 ***Very graphic and gross***

Brace yourself.