Nasal aspirators, snot suckers and brain eaters

As I mentioned the other day, there’s been a cold (and/or the flu) going around our house recently. My husband and mother in law were hit worst. I was just feeling a little under the weather / tired, but no big deal and the baby had the sniffles. But you know what baby sniffles mean? They mean someone has to get that gunk out of her nose because she can’t do it herself – and so we introduce the nasal aspirator, or as we call it, the snot sucker. She loves it! Just loves it. Who wouldn’t love having some plastic jammed up their nostril to suck gunk out? Clearly the screaming and head thrashing and hands up mean that she LOVES it – right? That’s a true sign of baby love.

It occurred to me that it’s not much fun and maybe it hurts or is uncomfortable, so I asked my husband if he’d ever tried it on himself. He looked at me like I was nuts and said, no, why would I do that? Now before you think I’m totally nuts too, not only is he a man who tried all the baby food (and breast milk!) to see what it tasted like (as did I – except the bananas because I hate bananas!), but he's also a paramedic – so he has to do this to people a lot. And heck – maybe they had to practice it on each other in clinicals or something? What do I know? I know they all had to start IVs on each other (reason number 8000 why I will never be a paramedic. I don’t do well with that when the really skilled practitioners do it. Like I want a rookie!), so it’s not totally unreasonable. But he said no, he hadn’t. So I decided to try it on myself (yes I cleaned it before and after!) and I’ll tell you what – nothing. It felt like NOTHING! I tried shoving it really far up my nostril figuring her nostril is lot smaller than mine, so that would be more comparable. And I did it with the big, hospital issued one, rather than the nice cute little CVS one we got more recently. Now, it’s arguable that it feels different for her. She’s smaller and all that. But sometimes she sits for the little purple CVS one like it’s no big deal (which it is!) and she doesn’t even notice. So I really don’t think it hurts her or causes discomfort.

Which leads me to believe she must think we’re attempting to suck out her brain with it. Sure she’s 9 months old. So she doesn’t know what a brain is. Or more to the point – she doesn’t know where her brain is to know that this would be the right access point. But otherwise I’m at a loss.