Boogers. Fun to pick, and occasionally challenging to flick.
Kids are enamored with boogers. They have no shame, they pick and flick, smear and wipe them anywhere. Yes even the girls do it. When I moved the girls bedrooms around last year, I laughed so hard I cried when I saw the line of boogers on the wall next to their beds. And upon closer inspection I saw them just under their pillow height on their headboards.
FYI dried boogers are surprisingly hard to get off of walls, furniture and the sort.
You know what else kids are notorious for? Denying anything they know is embarrassing or will get them in trouble. It’s a defense mechanism of humanity, it’s our fallen sinful nature. Deny, deny, deny. Even when facing irrefutable evidence, kids will default to denying if they think they have a chance of getting away with it.
Okay, okay I am sure there are some parents that swear their kids are angels and they don't lie. I promise you, they do, they have or they will. They are human.
My kids will never claim a booger on a wall. The bigger the booger the less likely for one to claim it. Usually I can find booger remnants on the top of a nose, a finger or guilt freshly laden in ones eyes. Sometimes the size and consistency of the booger gives its owner up before they have a chance to offer a plausible alibi. But this most recent booger mystery had both Tanner and I perplexed.
I had just cleaned out Raelynn’s nose because she had boogers that seemed like it must be hard to breathe given the number of them. I cleaned them out, tossed the tissue in the trash, washed my hands and handed her off to Tanner.
It was during our Bible lesson when the booger scene unfolded. Madi and Emmy were closest to Raelynn. Tanner was holding her. Carolynn was on the bed facing me with everyone behind her. I sat in the rocking chair reading the material. Then a bit of a ruckus ensued. Madi and Emmy got giggly and rambunctious too close to Rae. Tanner and I both warned them but they either didn’t hear us or didn’t care. They continued, there were hands in faces and on each other, it was a lot to monitor so Tanner sternly told them to stop. Then, he sneezed into his elbow so he stood up, lay Rae down on the bed and went into the bathroom three feet away, wiped his nose and washed his hands. A lull in both activity and noise occurred in his absence, at the time I thought nothing of it but proceeded with the lesson. We finished Bible with no other events occurring.
That is until we saw it.
I was about to take Rae from Tanner to put her in her bassinet while we got the older girls to bed, and the undeniable shape, color and texture of a very large booger smeared on Rae‘s right arm jumped out at Tanner and I. We both stared at it, then at each other, then at it again and back to each other. Perplexed.
How did this happen? Whose booger was it?
It was much too large to have come out of Rae‘s nose. She would've been turning purple from lack of oxygenation. Babies are obligate nose breathers so this booger would not, COULD not have been in her nose and gone unnoticed by either Tanner or myself.
From my vantage point, it clearly wasn't Carolynn, her hands were occupied by holding the bible lesson visual aides and I was conducting the lesson. Sure I could have been the culprit but even if I had that large of a booger and the weird need to flick it toward my children, I simply did not have the open shot to bypass Carolynn and Emmy to hit Rae's arm just right. Not to mention my complete lack of aim and tendency to either over shoot or undershoot any target when it comes to throwing things. IF it had been my booger, that would have truly been a once in a lifetime shot.
Which means we have ruled out Carolynn, myself and Rae.
That leaves Emmy, Madi or Tanner. All three of them have specific tells when they are lying and they know they are caught. Allow me to elaborate.
Emmy -- When caught in a situation with a precarious outcome related to her proven involvement in an event, her eyes get really wide. She insists, persists she had nothing to do with it, smiles a little, then clamps her mouth shut and shakes her head side to side occasionally crossing her arms.
Madi -- When caught in the act of defiance or embarrassment she tucks her chin to her chest, turns her head slightly to the side away from you and mutters "top it" which means "stop it".
Tanner -- Wears a blank face of complete perplexity, looks me in the eye and proceed so say " I don't know, maybe it was (insert whatever here)".
The problem with a tell, is they only work if one person does them. But ya'll, all three of those jokers did their tell. Every single one of them.
Now, I will say, the odds of my husband wiping a booger on his daughter and attempting to pin it on one of his other daughters is HIGHLY unlikely. Impossible, nothing is and when you're a detective at the scene of the crime, you can't rule something out because it seems unlikely. Did he maybe sneeze a booger out, manage to miss his elbow and it hit Rae's arm and he just didn't know? Sure.... but wouldn't he then see it, most people follow their sneeze rebounds. Like in basketball, you the shooter know where your rebound is going because you fired the shot. You the sneezer know where your booger is going. So IF it was his rebound booger from his sneeze, surely he would have quickly removed the evidence and called it good. So perhaps, he genuinely was perplexed and at a total loss of explanation.
But the other two? I don't know. It was a really big booger so I can't see it being in Madi's nose, she has been known to say "I has booger. Det it" because she can't get it herself. And on the occasion she can get the booger she then holds her finger out to an adult and says "you wipe off" notice I didn't say she asks, its definitely more of an order. I don't blame her no one wants a booger on their finger.
And Emmy? She is the child that would stop mid bite if something was on her hand during a meal and aggressively shout "NAPIN" for napkin and to this day hates things being on her hands. So again I just don't see her picking a booger and being discrete about getting rid of something so huge.
BUT if ever there were two children of mine to conspire and join...boogers, if you will, to create a monster booger it would most definitely be Emmy and Madi. Do I think they would mesh their boogers together and wipe it on Rae? I mean maybe when she is old enough to get on their nerves but not in this season of life. They are enamored with her.
Which begs the question, where did this monstrous glob of a bloody booger come from?
Whose booger is it?
We changed Rae and she fell asleep shortly after,
but I'm tempted to send the booger out for analysis to get the answers once and for all.
Kommentare