Freaks & Geeks Parenting

Bbbbbrrraaaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnssss!!!!!

So  Ronan and I are chillin’ on the futon, laughin’ it up like a fuzzball on Hoth. He’s enjoyin’ bein’ tickled, and I’m enjoyin’ watchin’ him laugh. When, suddenly, if Ronan actually could verbalize his thought process, he thought something like, “Gee, there’s an open hole in Dad’s face, I wonder what’s inside?” and without pomp or circumstance he jammed his index finger as far up my nose as he could.

And then he laughed.

And then he removed his finger because I yelled “Ouch!” and Terry yelled (from the back bedroom) “What’s wrong?” and then he looked a little startled. That’s when I began to feel the blood start to flow out of my nose. I asked Terry, who by now had entered the living room, “Am I bleeding?” and she said no and handed me a tissue. I put it up to my nose and a small, but not insignificant, amount of blood was present. And then more. And then more.

Ronan had touched my brain, I think. My nostril hurt from about the middle back up into my sinus (or whatever the interior of the nose inside the head is called.)

It’s probably partly my fault that Ronan now carries a sample of my grey matter underneath his fingernails.[i] My father-in-law told us a story about how my sister-in-law accidentally amputated the tip of her daughter’s finger, and ever since then I’ve been remiss in clipping Ronan’s fingernails. Terry does it but we basically have to wait until he’s asleep as he hates the process and waves his hands in the air like he just doesn’t care.

So when he scooped out some of my brains with his finger, it’s wasn’t just a sharp nail. It was a trowel; a claw attached to his finger, which was perfectly sized to go where no one had gone before, except maybe my ENT. So he dug a channel in my nose, perhaps to facilitate scooping out more brains on future spelunking expeditions.

Terry gave Ronan a stern talking to about how he should respect other people’s personal space. I’m sure he will retain every word, as he smiled through the whole thing and doesn’t actually speak yet. He may have said “Dad” at one point but they jury’s out on whether he knew what that meant or if he was just mimicking Terry at the time.

It’s two days later and my nose still hurts. I don’t mean to be gross but I blew a giant wad of dried blood out of my nose, and the next day there was another giant wad of dried blood when I woke up. Fun!

Perhaps Ronan is removing me a piece at a time; first, the eyeglasses, with the accompanying epithelial shave; then, slowly scooping out my brains through the nose in the ancient Egyptian method. Only I’m still alive at the time. Add in the slow removal of my ever-present but still interesting (to him) chest hair, and you could say my son is slowly dissecting me.

Because he’s a happy and joyful baby, he’s having a wonderful time doing it. Except for the pain of brain removal, chest depilatory, and unmedicated rhinoplasty, I’m enjoying it too.