Indestructible

Oh, today is just getting better and better. Georgia and I were playing at the coffee table with some paper and crayons, when she sort of stepped back and got that very funny look of concentration on her face that babies get when they are, you know, doing their business. If I had any doubts about what was going on, they were erased a moment later when a smell wafted over towards me... B and Ella got home just then and B took Georgia for a change while I chatted with Ella. Suddenly, B called out to me, with a frantic note in his voice, 'Nicole! Nicole, I think you better come in here and see this.' I thought that she maybe had a bit of diaper rash. Not even close.

She was sitting up and clearly there had been a bit of a poo-nami since the baby was stripped naked. Bruno pointed at her back, and I looked. At first I didn't notice anything odd, so B finally pointed his finger right at it, and said , 'Look at that!' Ladies and gentlemen, it was an orange crayon, probably 5 cm long.

I laughed, thinking Ella must have stuffed it down Georgia's pants, and we finished cleaning her up. I was carrying her into the bathroom for a bath when it suddenly dawned on me that Georgia had been wearing a onesie and that Ella couldn't have put the crayon in her diaper. I grabbed Ella and interrogated her but she denied all knowledge of the rogue crayon. (My suspicians increased when she started giggling, but I suppose, to a 5-year-old, there is nothing funnier than the scatological humor of your parents finding weird things in the baby's diaper. Man, this is going to be all over the cour de recré on Monday...)

I turned to B, and said, 'You don't think that she...' and he answered, 'I think she did.'

Now, Georgia is not big on putting weird things into her mouth but lately she has liked carrying around a crayon whenever Ella starts drawing. I've even seen her kind of gumming the big fat ones, but she's teething and I guess I figured, since they were non-toxic and so enormous, there was no worry about her swallowing them. But this was one of the skinnier crayons. And she does generally eat really well so I guess that I could imagine her trying to eat a crayon. Only, she hasn't been eating well the last few days which may have been due to a sore stomach- like maybe due to crayon indigestion. Oh geez, I can't tell if the pieces are falling into place or if I'm just taking myself into it. But this crayon seemed huge! How on Earth would she have managed to actually swallow it? But then, how on Earth would you explain this crayon in her diaper, otherwise?

I've just done the worst thing possible and googled 'baby swallow crayon diaper' and it confirms my fears that a baby could totally eat an entire crayon. I guess that I'll give the pediatrician a call tomorrow and see if I need to do anything else about this. I'm suddenly worried about what else she may have been ingesting on the sly.