If ingested, contact Poison Control immediately

Now that Benjamin can get around on his own, the requirements for our jobs as parents has gone up a notch. He’s been crawling for awhile, and its still his primary mode of transportation. But when he combines his crawling skills with his standing skills, he can suddenly get into a lot more trouble.
The other day I witnessed him adding another skill: the pull-up.
We have two sets of bookshelves in our living room. The bottom shelves have long since been cleared of their contents — we discovered quickly that he was fascinated by them — but the upper shelves haven’t been a problem. Even standing up at full height, and stretching his arms as high as they go, he still gets barely more than his fingers on the shelf. Turns out that’s all he needed.
As I watched, he crawled over to the first bookcase, and clambered to a standing position on the bottom shelf. Then he reached up with his hands, firmly grabbed hold of the next shelf up, and began to pull himself up into the air.
Fortunately his weight (which I believe is mostly in his giant head) was too much for him, and he was only able to get his feet about 2 inches off the ground, but I was still amazed as he dangled there, grunting and trying with all his might to get the fascinating books and baubles on the shelf just out-of-reach.
I digress though, because this is a story about Poison Control.
I’ve observed about women, that many of them have copious amounts of moisturizing lotions, skin creams, and other slimy substances that they lather themselves with regularly. When you’re pregnant, you also add “stretch mark” cream to your repertoire. Nic has a whole night stand full of these creams, which Benjamin previously had been unable to reach.
The other day we were in our room, looking over our finances on the computer, while Ben played happily on the floor. We took turns checking over our shoulder with enough frequency to be confident that he was alright. I saw him, on one of my turns, clambering toward the night stand, but I didn’t really think too much about it — until I heard a sucking sound.
I walked over to examine what he’d found (he sucks on everything, so this isn’t unusual) and realised he’d grabbed a tube of “Vaseline Intensive Care Skin Soothing Lotion” or something like it, twisted off the top, and started sucking out the contents.
I immediately grabbed it from him — noted to my relief that it was pretty much empty — and turned it over to read the warnings on the back.
If ingested, contact Poison Control immediately
While Nic looked up the number, I actually put the tube in my mouth and tried sucking on it. Sounds weird, but I wanted to know if he would have been able to suck out any of the tiny amount left in there. I got nearly nothing, except a slightly more moisturized mouth.
Poison Control turns out to be an incredibly friendly and soothing service. I explained very quickly that our 9 month old son had been sucking on a tube of Vaseline, and asked if we should take him to the hospital (Nic was already packing a bag, just in case.) The lady on the phone was very re-assuring, and knew exactly how to handle the situation. The worst case scenario might be some coughing and gagging, if he’d gotten any in his lungs, and if it got bad, we could take him to the hospital. But since it was empty, and he showed no signs of congestion, she assured us that there was no reason to worry.
We now have the Poison Control phone number saved in our cell phones — something tells me this won’t be the last time we need their services — and our night stands are clear of anything even remotely interesting!
I guess this only gets more fun as he gets taller and more mobile…