Experimenting with holes in your head

I suppose for every child, especially boys, there come a time in life where you have to experiment with what can, and cannot, fit into various holes in your head. This might involve a marble up the nose, a golf ball in the mouth, I don't know. In our case, Erik has just left to take Ethan to the emergency room to remove a popcorn kernel from his ear.

Here's how it happened: The kids were eating popcorn, and Megan came to me saying, "I don't want them in my ears!" I saw that Ethan had his fingers in his ears and was looking at Megan like a likely guinea pig for whatever ear experiment he was doing. I told him not to stick his fingers in Megan's ears (since that seemed like the extent of what he wanted to do).

A minute later, Ethan came to me with a mixed look of panic and sadness saying, "Mommy, I can't get it out of my ear." Sure enough, a kernel was pretty far in there. Erik and I tried gingerly to get it out with a tweezers, but I was hovering too much between hysterical laughter and outright panic so I couldn't do it. I sent them off to the hospital, where they will probably remove it with a tweezers and charge us $100.

This feels like a milestone every mother passes, one which I can put in the same memory folder as "knocked his tooth out on the tile steps" and "free fell off his lofted bed onto a pile of pillows" - you know, the ones that make the blood drain from your face, but thankfully you can kind of laugh about later.