My kids have always eaten things I didn’t want them to eat.
Middle Man ate his sister’s leftover PBJ when he was around one, before the age kids are supposed to try peanut butter. That’s how we found out he didn’t have a peanut allergy.
The biggest culprit of this has been the Blonde Bomber. Her first offense was the time she ate a shit sandwich. We were at a friend’s house, at the time our friend’s daughter was in a “diaper flinging” phase. This girl would poop in a diaper, then go somewhere private and fling her diaper and its contents all over the place. BB found it, picked it up, and walked out of the bedroom munching on it like it was snack time. That was a bad day.
She’s also taken bites out of a bar of Body Glide (an anti-chafe balm that has the consistency of deodorant and a ton of nasty chemicals in it). It took a call to Poison Control to make sure she was going to be ok after that one.
Recently she got into my nightstand and took out a pack of energy gels and smuggled them into her room. I eat them on my long runs, but BB decided she would eat a pack as a snack insead of taking a nap. Even though I knew these weren’t toxic, they were food after all, it still made me uneasy that she could so easily get something without me knowing and eat it in such a sneaky way. The only way I knew she ate the energy chews was I found the empty box and package under her pillow later that night.
I should’ve known something was up when she didn’t nap or eat dinner, but had plenty of energy at karate that night. She’d eaten six gels, the equivalent of 600 calories and the same amount of sugar as a Snickers bar, and bag of Skittles, and two Reeses Peanut Butter Cups…combined!
The next day I read a news story about dishwasher and laundry gel pacs and how kids have not only eaten them and been taken to the hospital, but some were poisoned to death. We use these same gel pacs in our house. What would it take for the BB to get a hold of a few of these? They are small, they look like candy and dissolve in water (saliva). I used to keep them under the kitchen sink, protected by only a child cabinet lock, but the risk of getting really sick seemed too great and unnecessary to continue to keep them there. Now the gel pacs can be found on the top shelf of our kitchen cabinets, a place where my wife can’t even reach. It’s a few extra steps and a little bit of an inconvenience, but completely worth the peace of mind.
Now, to find a way to keep her away from diaper flinging toddlers…
-Pete
