A mother left her young son in her mother's care. When the little boy's nose became too stuffed up with mucus from a nasty virus so that he was unable to comfortably breathe, the grandmother, literally, sucked the snot right out of the baby's nose. Would you ever do that?
Before you go all, "EWWWWWWW!", think about it. If your small child was struggling to breathe and all you needed to do to free his airway was to gently place your mouth over his nose and suck out the mucus and then spit it out, would you not? Sure, polite society tells us that we shouldn't do it. Out of embarrassment or shame, we feel that we could not admit to it, even if we did it. It's just too gross, plus there is the aspirator, isn't that it's job? Saline solution, it works, right? Wrong. Sometimes all that just doesn't work and your baby can still struggle to breathe.
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Well, I'm here to tell you that there is nothing that I wouldn't do to make sure that my kids are healthy, comfortable and can breathe. Not being able to breathe is very uncomfortable and can even be fatal so, yeah, I too have sucked the snot out of my baby's nose…when they were newborns. I've also chewed up food and fed it to them when they were toddlers. I'm not sucking snot out of any 7 and 9-year-old noses or chewing up food and feeding them like baby birds these days but I have. I refuse to be embarrassed for loving my kids.
My point is this, we all do the best we can for our children. Sometimes we do unconventional things because that is what works for our family. It may seem weird or downright gross to others but we can't judge a parent (or grandparent) until we've stood in their shoes, well, as long as it's legal.
Hell, people probably think I'm a weirdo because I refuse to let my daughters eat raisins. I refuse to let them eat raisins because when my oldest was 18 months old, she almost choked to death on a raisin. She turned purple, she went silent; there was no air moving.
While my husband was fumbling for 911, all I could think was, "You are not dying on my watch!" I heimliched, I reached my finger down into what was probably her esophagus and dislodged the raisin and don't think for a minute that my brain wasn't already scanning the room for a pen and knife to trache her. Luckily, I didn't have to but when you're a mother, you will do anything to save your child, so sucking snot doesn't even register as being weird out of all the things I'd do to save my child or make them comfortable when they are sick.
Image via The TRUTH about Motherhood
