Bugs In Your Nose….

So I may have told a little, teeny, tiny, microscopic, white lie to my three year old.

She was picking her nose in the family room right before lunch and I was busy. Too busy to ask her for the millionth time to go and get a Kleenex. Too busy to get her one myself and hand it to her. Too busy to ask her to stop, for the love of all that is pure and clean in this world to quick digging around in her nose before I lost my marbles so I said something, in retrospect, I’m not proud of.

Me: Chloe, you shouldn’t pick your nose because there are bugs in there.

Chloe: WHAT? BUGS? What colour are they?

Okay that went over better than I expected in some ways but also, potentially scarred her for life. We can’t be certain of that until the teen years. A risk I was willing to take to get my lunch in my mouth and her fingers out of her nostrils.

Would I have pulled that kind of nonsense approach to parenting with Hanna or Ellie? Of course not. Chloe is the third born. With Hanna, I would have started by calling Telehealth Ontario to rob a nurse of her time to gain some free advice on why my child was picking her nose, trying to get to the root cause and if I should rush her to the closest walk-in clinic or try my luck at a home remedy.

Failing any acceptable level of empathy from the Telehealth nurse and ultimately a member (or two) of the management team, I would delve deeply into ways I could possibly be responsible for being a driving force behind this behaviour in my child.

After all attempts at making sense of the psychological and physiological reasons behind the picking, then the guilt, my God the guilt, I would start googling random stuff about kids who pick their noses and success stories on those who have quit.

But Chloe’s the third born. There simply isn’t time in the day for this kind of additional distraction and I’m tired. I tried to help Hanna with her grade four math review on probabilities and quickly concluded the probability of me telling Chloe she had bugs in her nose was extremely high.

So bugs it is.

Mother of the year.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *