If the shoe fits: The bio-hazards of little girl toys

As parents of a little girl, we spend a fair amount of time trying to protect our precious little angel from the dangers of princess-itis. We don't want her female ideal to be a damsel in distress whose only power comes from her beauty and position in society. It's hard, because generally girls do seem to be genetically attracted to pink, frilly crap. And there's a lot of it.

As parents of a little girl of color, we spend a fair amount of time trying to protect our precious little multi-racial angel from the dangers of blond, blue-eyed, unnaturally proportioned bimbos (real and imagined), as well as the hyper-sexualized, morally bankrupt little cha-cha tchotchkes that see the dictionary as merely an alphabetized collection of suggestions. 'N eye meanz U, Bratz.

Last week, we dropped the ball on both counts and learned just how dangerous these things can be. Then, as punishment, we paid the price with an expensive tour of the American healthcare system.

It started during our trip to Savannah when the grandparents presented their pride and joy with a little plastic Cinderella. Of course, our girl went bat-shit crazy over it, and that's fine. We've never issued an all-out ban on skinny, blond princesses. We just try to counteract any ill effects they might have down the line by encouraging her to play "President" instead of "Princess" and filling the toy box with dolls who look a little more like her. There's Okie, the half-Japanese/half-white bendable party girl; Barbara, the plush, brown-skinned Dominicana; Quincy, the half-Chinese/half-white, free-spirited pixie; and Snoopy, the sassy, part black/part white Beagle.

As our girl tore into the pink packaging to get at Cinderella, we all noticed the high-heeled slippers were really small. Tiny, even. But the package said for ages 3 and up, and since our daughter will be three in a couple of weeks and she's pretty much a genius, we decided it shouldn't be a problem.

Less than 24 hours later, I'm in shower and the wife is drying her hair when we hear, "Ahhh! Help! The slipper's in my nose!"

There was panic. There was a crude extraction attempt with tweezers. There was a sneeze. There was a pink, high-heeled Cinderella slipper where there wasn't one before.

We wanted to believe it was the one that we spotted in our little genius' nostril, and it helped that we could no longer see one up there. She wasn't screaming anymore. She didn't seem hurt, so we chose to think we had averted a crisis.

Wrong.

Upon arriving back home later that night, my wife used one of those nose and ear-looker things and found the slipper snugly positioned much deeper in our little President's nose, plugging up what seemed to be the entrance to the sinus cavity.

The private emergency clinics were all closed, so it was off to the real American public healthcare system emergency room. Thinking we were smart, we went to the smallest hospital in the area to avoid the 12-hour waits we've heard about. Instead, we waited just two and half hours, surrounded by your poor, tired, huddled masses in various states of distress and disease -- old women with hacking coughs, young women with screaming babies, and concussed Boy Scouts with bloody dish towels pressed to their heads.

Eventually, we were seen by a pubescent doctor who was totally flummoxed about how to suck a pink slipper out of a child's nose. Because we have insurance, we only had to pay $125 on the spot for nothing more than tears and the chance to see the check-in lady enter "Caucasian" on the form for my daughter's race, even while she's standing face to face with my Asian/Latina wife.

The best the doctor could do, he said, was get us an appointment with an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist the next day. We took it, and Sleeping Beauty had to spend the night with a slipper up her snout.

The ENT doctor saw us bright and early the next morning. Because we have insurance, the co-pay was just $10. It was just an hour wait for him to traumatize us all by squirting an antihistamine and numbing agent up her nose, followed by a long, skinny set of tweezers, which he pulled out of my squirming and screaming child without a slipper, but with plenty of blood and a fresh case of PTSD.

It was then decided the best course of action would be a visit to the outpatient surgery center, where she would be knocked out long enough for them to remove the slipper. No one told us how much this would cost, so I had no chance to properly weigh the option of just going home and using the vacuum attachments.

We were ushered over to the surgery center, where we were asked to offer up a $500 deposit by the nice lady whose office was decorated with Bible verses and mission trip photos of her and brown-skinned children.

"How much is this going to cost?" I asked.

She said most surgeries there were at least $5,000. I told her we were just getting a slipper sucked out of our girl's nose and we would rather not put down a $500 deposit.

She just said "OK" and that was that. I guess this was sort of an "optional" deposit?

Every little stop on our tour of the outpatient center after that included some form of "When was the last time she had anything to eat or drink?" and "So, you're the Barbie shoe parents?"

That they thought I let my nearly 3-year-old daughter play with Barbies was more embarrassing to me than the fact that we actually let her play with tiny, age-inappropriate toys while we weren't looking, or that our genetic copy was the type of kid who stuck things in her nose, a la "Appalachian ER."

At 12:10 p.m., the anaesthesiologist wrestled our girl from our hands and took her crying back to the operating room. We went to the waiting room, where at 12:20 p.m. the doctor brought us the little pink slipper in a bio-hazard bag, shook our hands and left for lunch in his $80,000 car.

At 12:25 p.m., our groggy daughter was just coming to and asking, "Mami and Papi, are you there? Can we get McDonald's chickens?"

We usually don't let her have that either, but since the McNuggets were going to her stomach and not her nose, we hit the drive-thru on the way home. We ordered a Happy Meal, they asked if we wanted the boy version or the girl version. We got the girl version.

It came with a Barbie-endorsed, pink makeup compact with lip-gloss.


If you don't think these things are a big deal, or maybe you just want to watch an interesting video, check this out:

If you want some multi-cultural toys, go here: Dolls Like Me