The Slice: Little ones missed their mark by a nose

LET’S START WITH a report on things kids put up their noses.

A few years ago, when her daughter, Lexxie, was 2½, Michelle Womack glanced toward the back seat of the family vehicle. She noticed that her daughter’s nose was running. Not a big deal, normally. But something wasn’t right.

The nasal discharge was blue.

A subsequent investigation turned up the cause: The child had stuffed an M&M up her nose.

Medical intervention was not required, Womack explained. “They melt in your nose, not in your mouth.”

Once when her daughter was about 18 months old, Denise Masiello saw red coming from the little girl’s nose. “I thought her nose was bleeding,” she wrote.

So she grabbed a tissue and attended to the child. “I proceeded to pull three or four strands of beets out of each nostril. I never knew so much stuff could fit up one tiny little nose,” said Masiello.

Debbie Beaudry’s family was driving home from a vacation when her then 3-year-old daughter, Katie, stuck a pencil up her nose.

“I turned around and pulled the pencil out,” wrote Beaudry. “The only problem was that the eraser stayed in.”

When the family got home to Ephrata, attempts were made to remove it with tweezers. “We only succeeded in pushing it farther up her nose.”

Two hospital visits and more than $1,000 in eventual charges later, the eraser was extracted.

When Jeff Guilford’s daughter was 2, she managed to get one of his wife’s craft beads stuck up her nose. They had to take her to the doctor. “He said that she was his third patient that day with the same problem, though not all were beads,” said Guilford.

When Erik Gillett was 3, he inadvertently inhaled one of those Red Hots candies, which uncomfortably dissolved way up inside his nose.

And when James L. Anderson was 4, he had to be taken to the emergency room to have part of a pussy willow withdrawn from his nose.

“Mangled Sayings Department: “My otherwise bright daughter, Roz, continues to butcher clichés, either by combining two or getting them completely wrong,” wrote Valerie Kitt. “When running errands one day she was trying to be efficient by taking care of ‘two stones in one.’ “

Once Roz, who is 25, wanted her sister to be patient and so told her to “Cool your horses.”

Then there was the time she referred to someone as a “Big fish in a big sea.”

Another reader said her office manager is famous for getting familiar sayings wrong. “The one we have all started using is, ‘You need to step up to the bat.’ We’ve gotten so used to saying it that now when I hear it the right way (step up to the plate), it sounds wrong.”

“Today’s Slice question: Is opening your refrigerator’s freezer compartment door often an adventure?