Friday, August 13, 2010

Money Hungry

A week ago Thursday, Joy's day had an unusual little glitch.

It involved one of Joy's fine-motor practice tasks, putting coins into her mission-bank from church. The bank is a globe-shaped receptacle to help kids save their coins for denominational projects (we've helped dig wells in Haiti, and support an orphanage in Benin). For Joy to practice dropping the coins in the slot, an adult gets the small stash of quarters out from the base of the bank and gives them back to her to drop in.

In general, she's gotten very good at it. But a week ago Thursday, she tried a new innovation. With one of the quarters, instead of putting it in the bank, she put it into her mouth.

I bet you can guess where it went from there. Her babysitter said that the look on her face as it went down the hatch was priceless! She was so not expecting to consume that coin.

We've not been particularly worried, having seen no particular ill effects. We did call the doctor, and they pretty much told us to watch for the quarter's exit -- and we probably don't need to worry as long as we don't see any signs of discomfort, lack of appetite, coughing, etc. She's continued to eat well, and doesn't seem distressed.

I guess we maybe should've been addressing Joy's constipation issue before this happened? It makes it... how shall I say... challenging to determine whether she's successfully gotten this thing out of her system or not. We have not yet observed its passage, four... erm... movements later. It's possible that we missed it. I guess if it doesn't show up soon, we'll have to call the doc again.

Poor kid, coins and cherry bombs. I'm amazed that she still enjoys food at all.

4 comments:

Big Daddy said...

Just stumbled across your blog. Glad i did. I've had quite a few "Elvis Sightings" with my 13 year old autistic son. Just didn't know what to call them. Now I do.

As for the swallowed quarter, my only advice is to stay clear of airport security for a few days. Good luck trying to explain this to a grumpy TSA officer.

Anonymous said...

The drive to eat is strong, eh?

Quarters are big! I'm impressed.

What a sweet fine motor activity!

Barbara

tracey (aka rainbowmummy) said...

I admire how calm you are. I'd be a wreck.

Poor Joy!

JoyMama said...

Big Daddy - welcome! Airport security, wow. That's one I hadn't even considered! Good thing we never go anywhere...

Barbara - I guess this bodes well for eventually learning to swallow pills, hm?

rainbowmummy - well, since I didn't even witness the event, there didn't seem much sense in panicking post-hoc! :-)