I stuffed a gazillion toothpicks into the car ignition when I was 5 ish.

And as to how you can make the stories haunt your child forever: my mom's been interviewing with principals this past week. The one today she's known since I was a toddler, and I know the woman too. How did she prompt my memory? "Oh, she's Garrett-with-the-beans-up-his-nose's mom. You remember her now?"

And I do. I can barely recall the child who I buddies with at that preschool, but I remember Garrett-with-the-beans-up-his-nose. He got a lot of them up there. It required a trip to the ER where the staff was just amazed at the number of beans in his nose.

Baked Potato remains sounds right, too.

The foot was MUCH less swollen yesterday-- almost normal. Today, I think because I have been upright all day and walking about, it is swollen, but not to anywhere near the size it was, say Tuesday night into Wednesday. At that point, I seriously thought my foot would burst

When I was a toddler I managed to swallow the metal ring from a diassembled ballpoint pen. My parents then tried the medically sound remedy of holding me upside down by my feet and shaking me until I coughed it up. (Worked, though.)

My sister put peas up her nose (as well as managed to get a Q-Tip shoved so deep into her ear that it almost got stuck). All I did was jump off the swing and nearly bite my tongue off when I was 3, trip jumping rope and nearly putting out my eye on the corner of a toybox when i was 4 (still have the nice scar just above my eyebrow), and swallow the coin my grandpa brought back for me from Sweden (still remember seeing the really cool X-ray of my stomach when Mom took me into the doctor's, but my poor aunt ended up retrieving the coin when it eventually worked its way out of my system--yes, in the very yucky way that I won't detail here).

no need, Kathy, I think we all know.

Oh, and Sophia, I was thinking about you last night when my cat decided that my forearm made nice prey and tried to bite it. After dumping her onto the floor and checking for bitemarks (she didn't dig in that hard, thank goodness!), I looked at her crouching on the floor beside the couch and eyeing the other forearm. I managed to stop her from leaping, but it took a concerted effort to snap her out of stalk mode. Very scary stuff, because I'd never seen her that keen to attack me before!

Dear Lord, perhaps the cats are trying to take over the earth!

When haven't the cats been trying to take over the earth?

I swallowed a quarter on two different occasions. Yes, you read that right, putting a quarter in my mouth and accidentally swallowing it the first time wasn't enough to learn me not to put quarters in my mouth, I did it again a few years later.

I managed to stop her from leaping, but it took a concerted effort to snap her out of stalk mode. Very scary stuff, because I'd never seen her that keen to attack me before!

I got trapped in our office by my cat. He likes to hang out in makeshift caves, and one of them is the closet in the office. I was walking around in the office and he started hissing and growling at me, and I put on a primate threat display to get him to back down, but it didn't work. In fact it kind of backfired, because it really got the hair on his back up, and he started yowling and hissing even more and backed me into a corner. I had to have S come into the office with the squirt bottle and squirt him until he ran off and found somewhere else to hide.