All This For A Jelly Bag

All I wanted to do was buy a stupid jelly straining bag at the hardware store and go home. There is a thrift store next to the Hardware store, so my husband took Danny over to look around. I was happy-I purchased my jam bag and headed back to the thrift store. As I was standing right next to Danny, he picked up a broken water globe and got the plastic snow and liquid all over his hands. That would have been OK but before I could stop him he had them in his mouth and nose to try and wipe it off (yeah, I know).

I had to plead with an employee to let us use the loo so I could wash his hands. Only after checking with a manager were we permitted to use their restroom. I washed Danny up but then noticed quite a bit of the stuff up his nose. The woman went off in search of the manager again. I didn't ask her to, but she did.

The manager (an older woman) looks at the broken water globe and irritated asks:

"What do you want me to do?"

It was utterly insane. I didn't ask her to do anything (except let us use the bathroom, which she finally did) but she continued to act confrontational like she thought we were going to sue her or something. Finally I asked if we could perhaps take the broken water globe with us to the hospital to have him checked over- in case they needed to see it. She reluctantly handed it to us informing us to "be careful, it's broken." Yeah, thanks for that warning.

Sitting in a room at the hospital waiting to be seen, my husband starts explaining to Danny that he may need ipecac. We were pretty sure he wouldn't (though I was more concerned about him having pieces of plastic jammed up his nose) but his dad wanted to give him a good scaring so he'd never stick his hands in his mouth again. To illustrate what ipecac does he leaned over and loudly pretended to vomit. It was quite dramatic. And loud.

The thing is, these newly built hospitals have very thin walls and within seconds, the nurse and doctor came running into the room to see who was throwing up. I imagine there's a chart now that reads: "Father is retarded." Anyway, they laughed and told Danny to relax, that no one uses ipecac anymore and if it really comes down to it, they'll pump your stomach.

They didn't know what to do either, so they called poison control. It turns out, the water globes aren't completely non-toxic and have small amounts of (get this) propylene glycol-that's anti-freeze, to work as a preservative. Granted, he'd have had to drink the whole thing-or according to poison control-a dozen before it would have any effect, but still. The doctor checked his throat and nose, told him to keep his hands out of his mouth and we went home a few bucks poorer. He's fine, but man, it damn near gave me a heart attack when I saw his mouth full of plastic snow.

And by now everyone in town has likely heard about they guy acting out the effects of syrup of ipecac for his kid in the out patients.