“Daddy, there’s a flower in my nose.”

So, my wife left town for a few days to visit some friends in Austin. I stayed behind to man the fortress with our 6 kids ages 6, 4, 4, 2, 2, and 1 (that’s right). Saturday night we did our normal routine: read Bible stories, said our prayers, then put them in bed. About 30 minutes later I hear one of my 4y/o daughters crying. I go into her room to check on her.

She is sitting up in her bed, eyes half closed: “Daddy, there’s a flower in my nose.” I laugh a little at her funny dream and ask her, “How did a flower get in your nose?” Her: “The wand got it in there.”

Me: “So a magical nasal flower wand implanted a flower in your nose.”

Her: (confused stare)

Me: “Where is the magic wand now?”

Her: “In the drawer in the playroom.”

Me: “Let’s go back to sleep. I’ll look and see if there is a flower in your nose.”

I then preceded to do a fake nasal flower extraction when I noticed that her nose was red and bleeding a little.

Crap. Surely there isn’t actually a flower in her nose, right? I take her into the bathroom to look with a flashlight. Sure enough, at the very back of her nasal passage I could see the edge of something shiny. NOOOOOOO!

Me: “Did you shove a flower wand up your nose?!”

Her: “Yes.”

Me: “WHY?”

Her: “I don’t know.”

After numerous attempts at nose blowing, I figure that my best option is to attempt to extract this shiny object with some tweezers. Otherwise, I would likely be waking all of the kids and loading them up for a fun-filled adventure to the emergency room. No tweezers to be found. So, I head to the neighbors to ask if I can borrow some tweezers—not a cup of sugar or some eggs—no, no…a pair of tweezers to pluck a flower out of my daughter’s nose. After successfully borrowing tweezers I attempt to get the flower. No luck. It is too far back in there.

I then carry my daughter with me to the neighbor’s to see if they can watch the kids while I am at the ER. We decide to take one last stab at it. The three of us stood there—one of us with a flashlight, one holding the nose open, and one of us weilding the tweezers—playing a disturbing real life version of the game Operation.

Finally, my daugher is able to blow her nose enough to move the object into tweezer range. I pull out a shiny metallic flower a little larger than the head of an eraser. There was much rejoicing.

The moral of the story: Avoid magical-nasal-flower-wands at all costs. They are horrible toys.

Fine, I’ll start a blog. Congratulations universe, you win.

As I waited in painful boredom in Discount Tire for my tire to be fixed I decided to start a blog. It isn’t something I like to brag about, but I’m kind of a visionary who lives on the cutting edge of technology. I figure once I start a blog this “blogging” thing might really take off and become popular. You’re welcome blogspot.com.

Prepare to be amazed by my sparse updates and general lack of things to say that exceed 140 characters. In fact, there is a strong possibility that my fourth post will be: “Forget it, just follow me on Twitter.”