12 or 2... You Be the Judge

As a school nurse I see children do all sorts of silly things. A few years ago I had a student who would come to the health room about twice a month with a rock stuck in his ear. He would purposely stick one of the little pea gravel rocks from the playground into his ear and then run around saying, "What? I can't hear you. There is a rock stuck in my ear." His mom found it cute and endearing until the last time when it required surgery to remove the rock. You know, that was the last time I saw him in the health room for a rock stuck in his ear. Anyway, usually children outgrow sticking things in their ears or noses by time they reach age 2. Unless they happen to be a 12-year-old boy. I had long theorized that 12-year-olds and 2-years-olds were not that different when it comes to actually engaging the executive function area of their brains. Recently, as in yesterday, a 12-year-old boy (that shall remain nameless, but with whom I am well-acquainted) was goofing around with his dad and managed to get a JellyBelly stuck in his right nostril. They were trying to distinguish the coffee-flavored JellyBellies from the rootbeer JellyBellies. The dad said "You can just tell by the smell" so the 12-year-old boy proceeds to place the JellyBelly just inside his nostril to smell. He figured the farther in the JellyBelly went, the better he would be able to smell it. The strange thing, besides the JellyBelly up the nose, is that he wasn't even smelling a brown-colored bean. It was blue and white-speckled--definitely NOT a potential coffee-flavored bean. How did the bean get out of the nose? Well, it just so happens that this 12-year-0ld boy has a fabulously smart mother who had him block one nostril while blowing out the other. Yes, I realize we could have damaged his eardrums, but there was just enough airflow around the lodged bean that I did not believe we were in danger of rupturing the eardrum. Plus, his dad said there was no way he was taking the boy to the emergency room to have a JellyBelly extracted from his nose.