A little scare and some hope...

Today as we're just sitting on the couch, M feeling her braille letter tiles on her magnet board and me close beside her browsing away on my laptop, I hear her start to gag. My first thought was that she is choking on what would most likely be a small 1x1inch square magnetic tile, way too big to go down her little throat. She would sometimes put a corner of it into her mouth and chew but never has she attempted to put the whole thing in her mouth, nor any other object as far as that goes- including food! So all I could think is that she must be sick. She just drank two cups of diluted strawberry milk; maybe the box was expired and the grocery store didn't pull it off the shelf, as I had just bought them.

I picked her up and moved towards the bathroom. She was still gagging but was getting air so I figured it must be she was just sick. We stopped once we were off the carpet and onto hard floors that would be much easier to clean. She gagged and vomited more, with a little gasp for air. I stuck my fingers into her tiny mouth and felt at the back of her throat but didn't find anything foreign. I kept thinking "what am I going to do?" Were we going to need to go to the ER? She then acted as though she was finished gagging, but scared of what had happened. She has vomited many times in the past but not recently. After getting ourselves cleaned up, I went back to the tiled area to clean it too when I saw a little braille magnetic square with teeth marks on one edge.

I don't know what possessed her to finally try to eat a solid object after five years. Maybe it was an accident and she didn't mean to swallow; but a little piece of me is encouraged by the thought that maybe she is ready to bite and chew real food! Of course, we'll have to hold off on giving her objects that small again unless we're watching her every second. Most children her age know what they can eat and what they can't. M is different because she just never went through those stages in life when most children learn chewing, swallowing and what's not food. We didn't worry about it in the past because we couldn't ever get her to put anything in her mouth. All her meals are practically pureed in the blender before she eats them. Her little tongue knows how to sift out the tiniest piece of carrot or pasta. We can occasionally talk her into biting into an apple or powdered donut, but even then she immediately spits it out.

It was a huge scare and I'm sure most parents go through something like this, but I pray it never happens again. We always watch her closely and have never had a scare like this. Now that it is over, I try to look at the bright side. Sometimes the little things in life can give you the brightest day. And I am always thankful for the little things.