The Princess and the Pea

Maarit says to me last week: "Mommy, when I am big can I be a princess?" "Sure honey," I say, "You can be anything you want to be." She tells me she wants to be a princess because she saw it in a book and when she gets a wand then she'll be big and be a princess. We laugh and head to the grocery store. I think it is one of those sweet moments I'll remember forever.

Later Maarit asks for her favorite snack...frozen peas. She takes the little cup of them and toddles off to the living room to look at books and have her snack. After a while she is unusually quiet. She comes to the kitchen....

"Mommy! There's a pea up my nose!"


Sure enough that pea is so far up her nose I can barely, barely see green. She has never done anything remotely like this. I inwardly panic and then calmly try to massage the pea down the nasal passage while she kicks and screams and insists that she wants to keep the pea in her nose and she does NOT want it out at all!

But after much wrestling and many moments of thinking we were packing up and heading to the ER I finally, finally got that little sucker out.

Here is Maarit examining the pea....why I thought to take pictures of this moment is just beyond me....
And we had to have a close up of the pea itself.....and many discussions about why a pea NEVER, NEVER, NEVER goes up one's nose.
And a tearful, but happy, pea-free princess!