Evil Pack of Gum

This morning, I went out to the hardware store with Jake to buy sandpaper and spackle so we could paint his dining room. I bought a pack of gum. It looked like this.

I chewed it sporadically throughout the day. Out of a pack of 18 sticks of gum, I figure I chewed about 3 and Jake had 1, leaving about 14 pieces of gum. This will be important.

We put Abby to bed in her new twin-size blowup mattress bed. She was quiet. Maybe too quiet??

About 45 minutes later, we heard her knocking on the door to our room. I went to check on her and she told me she wanted to go to the party. (Suraya’s baby naming is tomorrow.) Or maybe she said she wanted to go potty?

Either way, I went to lay her back down in her bed and felt something sticky on her nightgown. And was that spearmint I smelled? I turned on the light and beheld the sight of my child SURROUNDED by gum wrappers. I screamed (quietly, because the other babies were sleeping) and visions of trips to Boston Children’s Hospital danced in my head. I counted wrappers and half-chewed pieces (and the few surviving whole pieces) an could account for all but 6 of the sticks of gum – give or take some sticky wads.

Brian instantly got on the phone with the Cigna 24-hour nurse hotline and I lay down with Abby in our bed. She fell asleep and I heard the tail-end of Brian’s conversation with the nurse. We should see the gum make its way through Abby’s system in the next 24-48 hours. If she develops a bad stomachache or begins vomiting we should either call the nurse hotline back or head to the ER.

Basically, no harm no foul. And the house is fully stocked with beer (as payment for the painting.) But we may need to call those nurses back to ask about the effects of 16 Double Stuf Oreos on the system of a 31-year-old woman.