I can't handle all this excitement

Last night we sent the girls down to clean the playroom. It's something that pretty much always needs to be done. After a while Natalie burst upstairs, FREAKING OUT. I have never seen her like that. "This is so BAD! I'm going to be in TROUBLE! I don't think we can get it out! I don't want to tell you!"

What on earth is going on???

"There's a bead UP MY NOSE." I took her in the bathroom and peered up her nostril, thinking I'd just grab a tweezers and pull that puppy out, and it was so far up I couldn't even see it. Ella started running around upstairs with her hands on her head "I AM SO WORRIED!" I took Ella downstairs to show me what the bead looked like. Meanwhile, Natalie, who thought she was going to throw up, ended up blowing the bead out her nose into the toilet. Apparently my strange children had poured plastic beads all over the floor and were sticking their faces in them, until Natalie inhaled one. Good times.

Today Natalie stayed home from school, unrelated to the bead. She's had a cold or allergies that's making her cough every 15 seconds. The sun finally came out today, so we opened up all the blinds. When she walked past a window, I saw her scalp looked dark. I took a closer look, and it was purple. It looked like a horrible dark bruise or something. Or like when you wrap something around your finger and it loses circulation. I asked her if her head hurt or was itchy. She said both. So I put Zoey down and headed to webmd to prepare myself for the call to the nurses. I was about to pull up the articles on psoriasis and some kind of sarcoma and then some other things I'd never heard of but sounded very scary, when Natalie came wandering in the room.

"I think I know why my head is purple."

"Really? Why?"

"It's sand."

"What?"

"It's sand."

"Wait, do you have purple sand at school?"

"Yes."

"And it got in your HAIR?"

"I think so. I told S. not to throw it, but she still did."

So I checked her head again, and sure enough. It wipes off. Because it's sand.

Can you imagine where this story almost went? I almost called a nurse hotline and told them my child had a purple, bruised looking scalp. At which point they would, no doubt, have told me to head straight to the ER, DO NOT PASS GO. Where a doctor would have looked at her head, and said, "She has colored sand in her hair. I prescribe a SHOWER for her problem."

And then I would have actually died from embarrassment. But at least I'd already be in the ER.