Choked Up

The kids and I flew home from our nation's capital this morning. I navigated two airports, two plane board and deboard processes, security, and worst of all, public bathrooms with Cue, Ess and Gee all by myself and all before 10:00 this morning, Washington State time. I have so many stories about traveling alone with all three kids that it's going to take me all week to catch up.

Also, I want to tell you about dinner with the AllMediocre group. I have never had so much fun with a group of woman that I didn't know at all, except that I kind of did know a lot of them really well. Blogging is strange like that.

First, this story from this morning because it has to get out of my head.

I fear choking above most things child-harming. Dread, panic, will-definitely-freeze-and-be unable-to-help-my-suffocating-baby fear it. I cut my kids' grapes into quarters and fight them for the hard candy at parades. My heart skips a beat when one of them coughs at the table. You get the level of angst here?

But, for some reason, I've always had a very devil-may-care attitude about ice. It seems safe somehow. It usually looks too small or too large to actually choke a child. It's also so melty and slidy. I have always thought that it might gag a child, but then it would, you know, melt and slide. A lot of ice also has that hole in it. That, you can't possibly choke on this because it's shaped like a breathing tube, hole. Like cheerios and other safe baby feeding options.

Ice. And cheerios. I'll take idiotic, incorrect mothers for 100 dollars, Alex.

First plane, somewhere between D.C. and Minneapolis. The three-year-olds are already antsy in their seats and Cue is driving me crazy doing anything but sitting on my lap cooperatively. The beverage cart wheels by us. I ask for two small glasses of ice because playing with ice, sucking on ice, dripping ice everywhere and generally being annoying with ice, amuses Ess and Gee more than any other entertainment I have devised to date. I hand over the cups and resign myself to two hours of being drippy and wet and cold while Cue sucks on the ice cube I hold for him in my hand.

Two minutes later, Gee wasn't breathing. He had his entire hand stuck in his mouth, a look of horrible terror on his face, and he couldn't breathe. No sound. No crying. No coughing. I swept him twice and he still couldn't breathe. I swept him one more time and knocked the ice cube back into his mouth. I was milliseconds away from standing up and screaming for someone to help me.

He cried against my arm. That dizzying, crazy adrenaline rush-buzz tingly feeling swept through me and for a few minutes I didn't know if I could hold the baby in my lap. I cried for minute too. Then, I took all the ice away and both my three-year-olds threw violent, loud, endless, have I mentioned loud, ice tantrums for the next, oh at least three years. Gee shrieked, "I want my ice," so many times that I'm sure the entire plane, the crew and the people in all the planes within 200 miles were thinking "Jeez lady, give him the ice, you can't choke on ice, it's water, just GIVE IT TO HIM."

Public service announcement. I'm the dumb mom who has performed this experiment and, yes, yes, you can choke on ice. Badly. Scary, mommy needs a shot of vodka right now at 7:00 a.m. in the morning badly.

My first coherent thought was holy shit, I handled it. I swept him automatically, without hesitating and I was ready to turn him over and give him the baby choking move if the last sweep didn't work. My last thought before I moved on to the next crisis d'aeroplane (that's French for the next traumatic, life-altering, boredom-induced need that 600 people must know about immediately despite the fact that your mother is sitting inches from you and cannot escape)? Thank all that is holy that he didn't puke all over both of us. We still had a long way to go.