death by blackberry

effin’ berries, man. they will KILL you. no, seriously.

i almost died wednesday and i’m not even kidding. h was so exhausted from his first day of daycare that he was still sleeping after i had gotten dressed and ready for work so i decided to head downstairs to devour some breakfast before giving the little man some bfast of his own. i decided on the ever-flavorful strands of fiber that resemble gerbil food, topped with some berries of the straw, blue, and black varieties. i was kind of woofing down my rodent cereal when all of the sudden a huge blackberry was stuck in my throat. i coughed- didn’t help. i tried to swallow- no dice. i pounded by chest- didn’t even phase my throat. that’s when i started to panic- i seriously could not get this damn berry out of the way so i could breathe. i could feel my throat kind of contracting…or maybe that was my heart thumping because i was starting to freak? it’s not like my whole life flashed before my eyes, but sort of. all i could think was “i have to survive. i have a baby. and he’s sleeping upstairs.” in no certain words i didn’t even care about surviving for me, but i cared to survive so my baby would have a mama. so- that’s new. at any rate, i threw* my cereal (*slight exaggeration) on the ironing board (that m so decoratively keeps by the front door on week day mornings so he can watch tv while he irons his shirts…that i have told him to iron on sunday night more so that the ironing board can go away than to save the time that i use as a reason to iron on sundays) and unlocked the front door (so as to run to a neighbor to get them to keep me from an obituary that read “death by fruit”) and that’s when it happened. i swallowed the culprit. i showed that blackberry who was boss. and it was me.

moral: chew your food. otherwise you may die and end up with a seriously embarrassing obituary.