Before I needed to pick a baby’s nose, I would not have thought about designating a pair of tweezers to be “nose-picking tweezers”. However, one finds oneself saying and doing different things in life, especially when one adds a baby!
My baby sometimes gets hardened mucus particles in her nose. Although she is occasionally able to sneeze them out on her own, they sometimes stay in for a few days. Baths only help loosen her clogged nostrils so much and mucus wipes marketed for babies do not seem to help me get very far inside her nose.
Young Sophie’s grandfather is the one who discovered that tweezers are very useful for cleaning dried snot. I use a rather tiny pair of tweezers which have a small head and which are less than 2 inches long.
Cleaning a baby’s tiny nose works like this:
- I wait for my baby to sleep and sit in a sunny spot where I can see into her small nose.
- I spray some saline spray to loosen solids stuck inside and hydrate her nostril. This sometimes makes her sneeze out what was clogging it. It is important to not spray too much of the saline solution; it distresses the baby otherwise.
- After the sneezing has subsided, if there is still something in her nose, then into the same nostril goes my smallest tweezers— which will now not be used for anything else! If the contents cannot be retrieved after a few tries, I stop and try again later. (It is bothersome to have your nose poked.)
Obviously, removing these physical instructions is quite effective for helping her breathe. All the same, I look forward to the day when Young Sophie is able to take care of her own nose and the nose-picking tweezers can finally be retired.
