I Still Remember the Phone Number

This afternoon, Matthew came dashing into the kitchen with his hand over one eye and told me that he had gotten toilet bowl cleaner in his eye. To answer the first question I’m sure all of you have, which is how he managed to do that, it was one of those moments when the bottle was difficult to open, he squeezed the lid harder, and then the forceful opening caused the bottle to burp. After all the insanity that I’ve dealt with all week, I was like, “Cool. Acid in your eye? Let’s call poison control.” Seriously. I couldn’t even really get worked up about it. But maybe that’s because I’ve called poison control in the past and they always know just what to do.

Since I’m past experiences with poison control were in my pre-blogging days, let me tell you a little bit of what happened. When Nathan was a toddler, he was a handful. Looking back, he tried my patience out of a combination of the facts that he was extremely curious, wanted to help with everything, and wanted to be a big boy. Matthew, on the other hand, was a handful because he was stubborn and mischievous. But I digress…

When Nathan was two, there was a week when I called poison control multiple times. The first time, he sprayed 409 straight into his mouth. Why? I truly could not tell you. The second time, he was eating a sucker and decided he wanted to see how it tasted dipped in laundry detergent. (In those days my washer and dryer were in the kitchen, so the laundry detergent only came out on laundry days. He waited until I was in the bathroom, of course.) Again, why? Again, I truly could not tell you. Nevertheless, the result was me calling poison control, following directions to have him drink water, wash his mouth out, etc. When you make a poison control call they always call back to make sure things are going ok so I felt like I developed quite a rapport with them.

There was a third near miss in that same time period. Nathan got ahold of the natural orange oil air freshener I like and sprayed it all over the kitchen table and all over his body. By that point I didn’t even bother asking why. But orange oil is acidic, and it was strong enough that it stripped the varnish off the table. (You can come look at it if you want. We were too poor to replace the table at that point and once Matthew came along, we figured we’d be better off keeping the naked table until all our children were old enough not to destroy a new one.) You can imagine the effect that same substance would have on skin. But Kevin and I are pretty smart, so we immediately stripped him down and threw him in the shower. I kept the phone in my hand, but the irritation that had been developing on his skin faded away as we got him clean.

So yeah. I’ve called poison control before. Once more was no big deal. As for Matthew, he was smart to come tell me right away. We got his eye flushed out quickly and luckily, there was no damage. I am, however, starting to feel a bit of trepidation about what will happen tomorrow…