Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
A bulb aspirator is a small rubber device (in our case, blue, and smelling sort of like vanilla) which new parents have so they can get snot out of their baby's nose. You compress, insert, allow to inflate and hope that along with the air, some boogers get pulled into the bulb. Then you get to clean the bulb. Yay.
While to the best of my knowledge, bulb aspirators do not appear on any developmental milestone list, they could. Babies are expected to protest this treatment, grab the bulb aspirator and generally fight the back by around six months.
At four and a half months, Teddy's objections to the bulb aspirator were strenuous enough I decided he could keep his nose boogers. Two days later, he expressed a strong interest (by leaning and staring intently) in some of hte items on the table by the rocking chari where I then nursed him during the day. I held him close and he picked up the bulb aspirator, which I imagined he had developed a strong dislike. Not so. The first thing he did with it when he picked it up, slowly but unhesitatingly and without wavering, was to gently insert it in one of his nostrils. Our child care, who was watching with me, was initially concerned, thinking that wasn't a good toy, what if he had put it in his eye or something? But while we weren't about to let him play with the bulb aspirator unsupervised, we had to agree that Teddy had shown us an interest we had not known he had, and a set of fine motor skills neither of us thought possible. When I told my husband later, he said if we'd videotaped it and shown it to a bunch of child experts, most would have denied the evidence of their own eyes, which may be cycnical, but rang true.
At a party shortly thereafter, I told this story to numerous adults, some parents, some not. With only two exceptions, everyone assumed the bulb aspirator went into the mouth (which, imo, would not have made such a good story). Two men guessed correctly.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created March 8, 2006 Updated March 8, 2006