Quit Bugging Me

The kids are always in a frenzy at meal times... swarming the kitchen and making food preparation a fine art in our narrow galley kitchen. The particular night of August 8, 2009, was no exception.

Hayden and Sydney were bouncing from counter to counter surveying the food and issuing complaints and accolades on the menu items. Audrey was in her bouncy seat on the dinner table starting to fuss because the music and accompanying water bubbles had stopped playing and Addisyn was making her usual protest at getting into her high chair. As I shielded my nose from her swinging appendages, she cried, "Iggy out. Iggy out!" When it finally clicked that her "iggy" meant "ear" (an odd but understandable morph of "ear" and "earring"), I took a quick peek at her ear. Not seeing anything and trying to prevent Sydney from squirting the entire ketchup bottle into her mouth, I moved on to distributing dinner plates.

Dinner progressed normally as Addisyn whipped her sippy cup across the table, Sydney serenaded us with renditions from High School Musical, and Hayden dramatically protested the consumption of baked beans. We had made it through dinner with few crocodile tears (they seem to appear while pleading a case against "gross" food), parental threats of consequence and repercussion (while ignoring said crocodile tears), and a semi-clean floor. Hands washed and shirts food stained (I'm not just talking about the kids here), we moved into the family room for some reading time.

Ray was two pages deep into Addisyn's most recent library book when she resumed her shrieks of "Iggy out! Iggy out!" Ray remembered we had been given an otoscope (device used to look in ears) by his father and I went running to retrieve it. Addisyn's screams had reached ear splitting levels. As I hovered over my husband and daughter impossibly trying to see what Ray was seeing, he finally removed the otoscope and uttered the nastiest thing I'd ever heard, "She has a beetle in there. I looked in and bug eyes were looking back at me." I stared at him for a moment. Then I had a full body shiver of disgust and kicked into a full freak out. "Take her to the ER! They have to get it out now!"

As I waited for news from the ER, I began cleaning the kitchen. I silently thanked my dad-in-law for the otoscope, started thinking of all the possibilities of how the beetle got into Addie's ear, stopped thinking of all the possibilities of how the beetle got into Addie's ear, and then started Internet surfing. How common was this? Was she going to be okay? How long was the extraction going to take?

After less than 30 minutes of being gone, Ray called. "It's out. The doctor gave it to her in a specimen cup to show you." Ahhhh... music to my iggies.