Baby Eats Glass! Mother is Incompetent!

That is the headline I'll be waking up to in the morning. It's a cheery one, don't you think?And yes, the baby in question is my baby. And yes, she did in fact consume some glass.

I think you'll remember that we put our Christmas tree up this weekend. Why, you ask? Because this was our one chance between now and the week after Thanksgiving.

We finally got all of the ornaments placed nicely on the tree. It looks gorgeous. Seriously, it's never looked so beautiful. I even took a bunch of pictures of some of our most special ornaments for the blog that I'll post on some night when Baby doesn't eat glass.

So tonight while I'm busy listening to Bal read his homework to me in our living room, I hear the teacher calling, "Help!" from the front room. I arrived to see him holding Baby in one arm and a busted glass Christmas ornament in another.

"She bit it", he said in explanation.

Still staring at him, I said, "Bit what?"

"Bit the ornament. She took a bite out of it and now she's eating the glass."

Now let me take a moment to clear a couple of things up.

• Baby is well-fed.
• We discourage our children from eating glass.

I rushed over to them and told Baby to spit out the glass. She smiled and began crunching the glass between her teeth. Seriously, is this child demented or what?

"No!", both the teacher and I shouted at her, which had no effect. Meanwhile Bal and Nod are dancing around the Christmas tree singing, "Baby ate glass...Baby ate glass", at the top of their lungs.

I finally pried her mouth open expecting to see a scene of carnage inside. But there wasn't anything. She hadn't cut herself at all. There were a few paint flecks on her tongue, but nothing else. Just to be sure,we used the sink sprayer to spray out her mouth. Then we checked her all over again to see where she'd cut herself. There weren't any cuts anywhere.

Then I called my mom. Now it's very normal for a woman to call her mother when something goes wrong, but my mom has the extra burden of being a nurse. She gets called a lot by me and is expected to dispense immediate medical advice over the phone at no charge.

To talk to my mom, though, you have to get through my Dad and, of course, my Dad had to know what was going on. After I told him, he had the audacity to LAUGH! The man laughed that his granddaughter had gleefully eaten glass, and then handed the phone to my mother.

Mom was more understanding. She calmly assessed the situation, (via phone) and determined that either Baby didn't really ingest any glass, or ground it up so finely that it will be fine. She assured me that it wasn't the first time something like this had happened to a toddler and that Baby would be fine. She gave me a list of symptoms to watch out for, and asked me to remember that I'm not a bad mother because my baby ate glass. Shows how much she knows.