pick a litle, talk a little

sunday night, when wile was saying goodnight to all of the ladies who were congregated in the living room for a post-marathon celebration (yay aunt sydney!), he passed another milestone: he stuck his finger up his nose for the first time.

i'll be the first to admit that i'm a picker. not in public, but in the privacy of my own home? i pick. i do. and if the results of the informal backyard poll that we conducted after dinner sunday night are anywhere near accurate, four out of six people are pickers. of noses, scabs, peeling sunburn skin, what have you. and the other two people say "eeewww!" and laugh at us.

of course, i've been thinking about my picking habits around wile. it'll be a good long time before he can distinguish between things that are okay to do in public and things that are only okay to do in front of people who love you anyway even if you're kinda gross, so i've been trying to set a non-picking example for him. cause nobody wants their kid to be the nose-picker. but it's freaking hard! i'm with the boy 24 hours a day, and much of that time is in the house, just the two of us.... and it's equally as hard to resist picking his nose. (oh, quiet down. you wait till you have kids!) i have limited myself to the boogers on the outside of his nose, which i figure are fair game. not that i have much success, as any time i get anything—a finger, a tissue—within two inches of his nose he goes into total defense mode, writhing and squirming like a crazy little monkey.

yesterday he took a bad spill, flat out on his face and left hand. he was taking some solo steps in the dining room and went over like somebody had hit him with petrificus totalus. he got a bump on his forehead and a scrape right under his nose. the scrape has turned into a scab, which, because it's right under his nose, which is running constantly these days, has become kind of encased in hardened snot.

it's taking every single last shred of my self control not to pick at it.