A few days after Christmas, Sammy sauntered into the kitchen as Noriko and I were getting ready to haul the lot of us over to visit friends for an evening kid play date (while their kids' dad and I went to catch a Stanford basketball game).
"Peter put a popcorn in my ear!" he announced somewhat whimsically.
I quickly grabbed and tilted his head, peered into the indicated ear and spied a hard, slick kernel wedged into the entrance to the ear canal. It was in too tight to allow the gentle insertion of any safe prying object (not that there's anything safe to put in there, the ENTs all tell us). All we could do, no matter how gingerly we tried, was push it further in.
We immediately bustled the kids into the car, telling ourselves that we'd be able to laugh about it one day, but slightly bothered by the image of a popcorn kernel working its way into Sammy's brain. Figuring that it would be difficult to manage Peter and Sammy simultaneously at the doctor's office, we headed to the friends' house first, where Peter and I would wait the news.
About an hour later, Noriko and Sammy arrived back at the friends' house, Sammy bearing his usual grin. With that, the boys set in to play and the friend and I headed off to the basketball game in peace.
I got home late, after Noriko and the boys had returned home, so I only discovered the latter half of the story the next day. In the late afternoon, I stepped out to the car to retrieve something when I found a small, orange-lidded jar containing a thin, off-color liquid in the coffee cup holder. I brought it into the house and asked Noriko what it was. She broke down in hysterical giggles.
It seems that it took the doctor about an hour to dislodge the kernel. In the end, he used a syringe to inject water on the other side of the kernel to blow it out with water pressure. Sammy was apparently a very patient patient, complaining only of some slight tickling, so on the way out of the doctor's office, the doctor offered him a choice of sticker (oh for the days of my youth when doctors would offer good children a pack of smokes...). But Sammy spied something better: the urine collection jars, like the one he was so proud to have properly filled on his last check-up visit to the doctor.
"I want one of those!" he shouted.
"You know what those are for, don't you?" inquired the kindly doc.
"Yeah. You pee in them!" Sammy affirmed.
Noriko assented with a shrug of her shoulders and a "whatcha gonna do?" roll of her eyes and Sammy proudly marched off to the bathroom with his prize on a mission to fill 'er up. Which he did, quite properly.
Not being a fool, however, Sammy also made sure to score a sticker.
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