Well, that should make for an interesting poop.

I understand that people don't want to hear about my baby's poops, and so I make a conscious effort not to post about them.  And you should therefore know that this post is not actually, in fact, about Leah's poop.  It's about the thing she ate that ultimately came out in her poop without having been the least bit digested.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Bad Parenting jury... my daughter ate a Band-Aid.

This is actually the end of the story, and nothing even remotely interesting happened after it, except that the next morning she did, in fact, poop out one tiny little bandage that had previously been at the tip of her left pointer finger.

Although I promised not to tell other people how to parent their kids, I can and will tell you that should your child ever consume a Band-Aid (or, in our case, Target store brand "flexible bandage"), it will likely not bother the child in the slightest and will go through the system unobtrusively in about 12 hours.

How I know this for a fact: Witness one lively, smiling, completely unharmed Leah Danielle Bush, who not only survived eating the bandage but also the wound that warranted its placement in the first place.

Leah's "first boo-boo" will go down in her personal history (read: "baby book") not as a self-inflicted wound, but rather as an accidental nip of her fingertip by her well-intentioned daddy as he tried to clip her fingernails.

(Aside: Up to this point, I had been biting them off, which sounds disgusting but is apparently a completely socially acceptable way of taking care of an infant's fingernails.  It's one of a bazillion things that people don't give a lot of thought to until parenthood is staring them dead in the face and some consideration has to be given to the fact that you will be completely responsible for tending to the activities of daily living of a very small and helpless being for the foreseeable future.  Tiny fingernails are scary.  Much scarier, in retrospect, than dirty diapers - because caring for them carries the potential for actual bodily harm.)

It bled a bit, and as we as first-time parents have no concept of how much blood an infant can lose before it becomes an Emergency, when it bled through several pieces of gauze and a first Band-Aid, we loaded her into the car and drove her to Urgent Care.

It should be noted that:

a) Leah giggled the whole way and
b) Her finger had stopped bleeding by the time we were in front of a medical professional.

Nonetheless, the doctor put a Band-Aid on the "wound" (though I suspect it was more to make Leah's parents feel better than to appease the actual patient) and told us to watch for infection.  But likely she would be fine.

Which she was, except that the trip to the clinic meant she had missed dinner, and so she was hungry and, at some point in the hour following our clinic visit, she sucked that little bandage right off her finger like it was a sugar-coated gumdrop, and down the gullet it went.

Truth be told, my first thought was that we should load her back in the car and take her back to Urgent Care, but no.  No no no.  I made myself give her a bottle and put her to bed, consumed foreign object and all - not because I wasn't actually worried.  I must've done a Breath Check every hour that night.

It was because, God help us, we are not going to become Those Parents.  I appreciate that Dean East Urgent Care indulged us once in six months; I was not going to press our luck by adding a second visit within  six hours.  Not for this.  Maybe for a fall down the stairs, but hopefully we won't ever have to put that to the test.