Saving Your Pennies.

My life long motto has always been - expect it when you least expect it. It pretty much always seems to prove true. If we’re worried about one thing - the opposite pretty much usually happens. If I take my eye off the ball for a second, that’s when it comes crashing my way. So having this motto, I’m always surprised when I don’t see something coming. I mean - I should get it by now right? Wrong.

Case in point - today we made a trip to the ER. It wasn’t one of those, “You’re going to poke your eye out with that thing - oh look, there you did it” kind of events. No, it was one of those “perfectly quiet mornings, everything under control, bam - should have been paying attention” kind of events. My two year old loves Mickey Mouse. As a matter of fact, we just got back from Florida where he got to spend every waking moment either waving to or waving goodbye to “My Mouse”. So, this morning I thought it would be perfectly acceptable to allow him to put coins into his brand new “My Mouse” bank. He loved the idea. He sat there with a wad of change from my husband’s pants adorably dropping them in one after another. I even commended myself for giving him an activity that would simultaneously teach him the value of a dollar while giving him practice with those important fine motor skills. Until he swallowed one.

Well - swallowed is really a gross exaggeration. It was more like lodging it in his throat so that his face almost turned purple and his breakfast came up. Much to the dismay of my 6 year old Charles who was busy watching Toy Story for the 342nd time, I had to move quickly. I ran Charles next door to my girlfriend and basically flew to the hospital with one hand on the steering wheel and one on my son. (This is a great position on your back by the way. My chiropracter especially likes it. Makes him a fortune.)

One construction road block, three x-rays and $150 dollars later, the foreign body in question made it down to his stomach and he enjoyed a morning of playing peek-a-boo with the nurses. Money well spent.

So now, after calming down from the hysteria of attempting the Heimlich maneuver and rushing to the ER I’m relaxed enough to laugh about it. But just a few short hours ago it did not seem all that funny. And I’m sure that over the next few days, as I’m searching for my son’s personal internal savings account, it will not be very funny then either.

Next time I think we’ll try a Money Market.