Things you learn when you have a baby

[oloriel]

The mucus of the Spanish slug is unpleasant and evil-tasting, but not poisonous.

Isn't that soothing?

I mean, I sort of intuited the "unpleasant and evil-tasting" bit. The "non-poisonous" part I learned from calling the Poison Hotline just now. Because, guess what? Felix tried to eat a slug.


He loves sitting on the garden path and playing with pebbles (that is, picking them up and putting them down in some other place, preferably behind some partition or in some sort of vessel, like a bucket). He knows by now that he is not supposed to take the pebbles into his mouth, so like any good toddler, he'll try to push one into his mouth anyway just to see if I still say "No". Sometimes, he'll ignore the "No". All you can do then is put your hand at the ready in case he chockes on it, and hope that he'll just move it around with his tongue and then spit it out. Fortunately, he hasn't tried swallowing pebbles yet.

Today, I saw him picking up a big brown pebble, and saw his hand move face-wards, and duly said "NO, Felix, don't eat that pebble". He had apparently already met his quota of obeying the "No", so he put it into his mouth. Normally, he then looks highly focused as his tongue pushes the pebble around. Today, he looked alarmed and disgusted... and spit out the big brown pebble, which turned out to be not a pebble at all but a big brown slug.
(EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW!)

I took him inside to wash his lips and hands then (of course, they were full of mucus too) and noticed that his teeth had gone all yellow and that his gums appeared red and blistered. So I did the second thing that came to mind: I called Felix' pediatrist and the poison hotline.
Our problem was a somewhat exotic one, so I didn't get any immediate information but instead the poison hotline lady promised to check her literature and call back. Five minutes later, she did indeed call back to inform me that to the best of her literature's knowledge, the slugs we have around here aren't poisonous to humans. Their mucus, however, is "evil-tasting and unpleasant" (NO REALLY!) so I was to offer Felix a lot of his beverage of choice to wash it off and down. The blistering might just be residue of the mucus and the reddenned gums might indicate an allergic reaction, so if that didn't get better with drinking, I was to see the pediatrist about it. (Who was waiting for my call anyway because he had no idea concerning the right course, either, so he wanted to know for future reference. I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT NO TODDLER IN THIS TOWN EVER TRIED TO SWALLOW A SLUG BEFORE. Am I the only parent who was concerned about potential poisoning? >_>)

Fortunately, due to the non-poisonous nature of the mucus, milk was fine, because guess what Felix refuses when he feels upset? Yup, anything that isn't milk. Now that he has drunk a fair bit, he has fallen asleep to recover from the exertion.


And thus we missed today's toddler group meeting. At least (I hope) Felix may have learned not to put soft (or ideally: any) pebbles into his mouth? :P Probably asking too much.

Comments

[naurring.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW! Just... ew. Good thing that it wasn't poisenous! Phew.

Unfortunately, I don't think he'll learn too much from it. XD Might have been just this one slug, you know, not *all* slugs...

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Well, now that I know they aren't poisonous, I'll be way more relaxed - whether he tries them again or no. (Though I still hope it'll be no.) XD

[satismagic.livejournal.com]

BWHAHAHAHAHAHA EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

*hugs*

God, you must have been scared. And grossed out. And relieved. And grossed out.

*more hugs*

I am in awe of all parents on this planet. I couldn't do that. Not ever.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Mostly scared. It's odd how much DOESN'T gross me out when Felix does it, but then I'm the person who gets to change his diapers...
You grow into it. >_>

The worst part was the wait between the first call to the poison hotline and the reply. Five minutes can last forever. *clings*

[http://users.livejournal.com/macalla_/]

*HRGH*
Alleine der Gedanke ... *HRRRRRGHHHH*
Aber gut, dass die Dinger nicht giftig sind.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Ja, das hat mich auch ungemein beruhigt. Es sah zuerst wirklich furchtbar aus - man konnte wirklich nicht unterscheiden, ob das nun Schleim oder Hautfetzen waren, und die Zähnchen leuchteten knallgelb aus dem geröteten Mund. Den Schleim kriegst du auch nicht so leicht abgewischt, der muss wirklich mit viiiiel Flüssigkeit abgespült werden (im Mund kann man ja schlecht mit Seife arbeiten...)
Aber wenn man weiß, es ist nur eklig, aber nicht gefährlich, kann man damit ja in Ruhe umgehen. Während ich auf die Antwort vom Giftnotruf gewartet habe, hatte ich ja noch Angst, dass Felix jeden Moment die Augen verdreht oder so. (Ich hätte mir natürlich denken können, dass die für die wirklich gefährlichen Sachen geschult sind und schneller antworten können. Aber man denkt ja nicht immer rational in so einem Moment...)

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

Auuuuuuuugh.

Make a mental note to take him out to a fancy French restaurant when he is of age and order slugs for him, just to see his face when you cheerfully tell this story. Parental karma replay.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

The French don't eat slugs, they eat snails. Slugs are the nasty ones that come without shells. Snails, on the other hand - particularly grapevine snails, the ones that get eaten - don't do the mucus thing.

My father (who is not French, actually) regularly made baked snails with garlic butter when I was (much) younger. Back then, you could buy them by the bucket at the weekly market in town. As a kid, I found that endlessly fascinating - when you bought them, the snails were still alive, and you'd see the big buckets on the market place where the snails tried to make their way out. Periodically, the stallkeeper would shove them back down - they were after all not very fast...

Anyway, I used to really like them as a kid. We had them about once or twice per month in the season, IIRC - always on Saturday evening because Saturday was market day. (God, that sounds so historical. I SWEAR I WAS BORN IN 1983, IT JUST WAS A RURAL AREA OK.) Dad only stopped making them when my mom stopped eating them - which was shortly after she began to hunt slugs (not snails) in the garden because they ate her plants. She cut them in half, so all the innards spilled out, and that spoiled her appetite. (We didn't know back then that killing slugs that way only attracted more of their brethren.) - These days, I probably wouldn't eat snails without inhibitions, as I've grown into a culture of non-snail-eaters. That's a purely acquired (dis-)taste, though! As I remember snail-eating and the special earthenware snail plates my parents had - with indentations for the shells and a little bowl for the garlic butter in the middle - when I eat steak that's a bit over-cooked or (oddly enough) zucchini that's been spiced with parsley, I assume the taste was somewhere in that direction. The snail meat wasn't slimy, either, but a nice tight piece of muscle, like smallish medaillons of pork.

But that's baked snail, not raw slug, and that was then - back in the olden days, when I myself had just barely learned that you shouldn't put ants in your mouth... ;)

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that there is a difference, I just knew "Schnecken" ;)

As we had market days on Saturday and Wednesday in Zollstock and AFAIK it is still like that it doesn't sound historical at all - actually I now live in a far more rural area and have no idea when or where the market is there.

Chocolate covered ants are a dessert somewhere, I think in Italy (too lazy to google right now).

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

There are still markets, but I don't think they have such an impact on when you eat certain things as they used to have in my childhood. Aside from family rituals (we ALWAYS had pea soup for lunch on Saturdays, because my father prepared great quantities of that in advance, then froze it in lunch-sized portions, and before we went to the market, he'd take out one portion and put it in the pot - by the time we came back, it was defrozen, so you just had to briefly re-heat it. And when there were snails, it was always for Saturday evening), some veggies just weren't had if they weren't in season. I don't think that's particularly common anymore (except for strawberries and asparagus maybe), unless someone is being particularly attentive. (I'm trying to be, but it's hard to resist the lure of tomatoes-all-year-round...)

Ants are eaten in several places, as are all sorts of insects. As a kid in the garden, however, I didn't cover them in chocolate or (at least) cook them. Soft tissue of the mouth + formic acid = OUCH. That's the lesson I learned. ^^

[chili-das-schaf.livejournal.com]

I think that's also a family thing, not necessarily just a generaion related one - I was born 1981 and vividly remember visiting the weekly market with my mom, so she definitely frequented it, but we never had day-related meals, only seasonal-related ones. And even those were things like asparagus and strawberries in Spring, like you already mentioned. Mushroom season is what I can remember and when certain berries were available.

My brother learned the lesson to not sit down on a lawn where red ants live when only a diaper is protecting your behind.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Quite possible! It's hard to tell personal experience and general experience apart, anyway. After all, you didn't eat snails, either... ;)

Ants are such convincing teachers, aren't they! :P

[samtyr.livejournal.com]

Ewwwwwww. Well, kids can and will put just about anything in their mouths. I'm so glad everything turned out ok for you.

Just make sure to keep all of this 'on file' so you can tell him this in the future.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Yup. Still hoping that in the case of slugs, one attempt was enough to put him off further taste experiments.

Oh hell yeah. That'll always be a useful story to embarrass a "cool" teenager and gross out future girl- or boyfriends... >:D

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Yes, they're edible - here's a recipe that looks pretty good (http://rickshawunschooling.blogspot.com/2007/10/wild-food-killing-our-own-meat.html). I haven't tried them; as far as I'm concerned, slugs are poultry food, but then I don't eat shrimp either. I've had escargot, and it was okay: almost anything is okay if you drown it in garlic butter.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we've got a lot of slugs, all sizes from wee tiny ones to giant slimeoids longer than your foot. It's not unusual for toddlers to taste one - one taste is invariably sufficient; I doubt very many slugs actually get swallowed - and it does them no harm. Actually, a very useful lesson in "Mommy says No for a good reason."

Toddlers burn out quickly on the word "No", and they don't process "don't" well. 'No' is so non-specific - it means "stop doing something", but doesn't indicate why, or what to do instead. "Don't (do whatever)" is ineffective because it contains the 'do whatever' - the classic example is "Don't think of pink elephants"; one can't process the sentence without thinking of them. Small children have little or no ability to separate the thought from the action, which is why they usually immediately 'do whatever' exactly what they've just been told not to do.

What you want is, first, some more specific words than 'No', such as 'Hot!' 'Sharp!', 'Stop!' and 'Yuck!', that will tell him what the problem is with whatever he's doing or about to do. Then you want to give positive directions about what you want him to do: "Yuck! put it down", "Hot! Move back!" "Stop! Stand still!" "Sharp! Leave it alone!", "Dangerous, stay off/climb down" (LOL, you may not need that one yet, but it won't be long.) Finally, every time you tell him and he minds you, smile proudly and praise him for it: "That's the way!", "I like how you minded Mama", etcetera. Learning to mind is very hard work, and often frustrating, so he deserves kudos every time he succeeds in understanding what you want him to do and doing it.

My daughter never tasted a slug that I know of, though I do remember her Dad stopping her once just before she tried, but once when she was about Felix's age she put this huge dead crane-fly in her mouth: ewwwww. Motherhood is this long, continuing adventure of learning to cope with squick; we oughta get medals or something for it: "The Slime-Green Badge of Courage"..

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Lol @ the slime-green badge of courage!

Actually, the squick factor is surprisingly low whenever Felix does something I'd normally consider yucky - completely replaced by "oh well, as long as it isn't dangerous..." I'm hardened by changing his diapers every day, probably. For every other person... :P

I generally am more specific than "No!" - if I have the time. It takes training in both directions, really - I have to remember to put my messages in a way that he'll understand them, and he has to learn to mind them. ^^

See, but even in that recipe, the slugs are de-slimed, killed and cooked first! A lot of things are inedible before cooking - I wouldn't have minded the "slug" part so much if I hadn't been worried that the mucus might be dangerous (it is, after all, meant to deter predators). After that, it was mostly a matter of getting rid of the sticky slime...

(I reportedly ate ants when I was very little. As they were not quite dead yet when I put them into my mouth, they presumably taught me why that was not a good idea... ^^)