Why do you have such a big nose?

This question was directed at me. And yes I do have a big nose. I came to terms with it many many moons ago so I did not take offence at the question. In fact it made me laugh and I gave my stock answer….

“I don’t have a big nose, I have a normal size nose but a small head and my normal size nose on my small head makes my nose seem big”

Ok..ok so I probably haven’t really come to terms with the size of my nose because if I had then I wouldn’t be saying stupid comments like the above I would just be saying I cant help the size of my nose!! But I do have a small head….and the reason I know this is because whenever I get new glasses they tell me I have a small head, and on occasion I have had to get children’s glasses because they fit my head better so I do have a small head. And I do have a big nose. But I swear I look ok for it!!

Anyway my nose does get in the way and one morning it really got in the way for my son. He wanted a kiss…..quite rare and so I gave him a kiss and when I did my nose touched his cheek. He took an instant dislike to this. He said he wanted a kiss without my nose touching his face. I am not kidding you, you would not believe how hard this is for someone who has a large nose. I thought it would be easy. I tried and every single time I kissed him my nose touched his cheek. No matter how I placed my head it touched him. And every single time I kissed him, and my nose touched him he got more and more upset. I have never hated my nose, Never before did I feel such hatred for my nose as what I did right then. I even tried squashing my nose with my hand and then kissing him but my hand touched his cheek. There was nothing for it, I was gonna have to have a nose job!!!

In the end I told him I couldn’t do it and that I was sorry I had such a big nose. And although he was upset after a while he came to terms with it. Although for a long time afterwards, and every now and again he will ask…

“Why do you have such a big nose?”

He also asks my husband this…because my husband also has a rather large nose. They say you end up marrying someone who looks like you…well I have ended up marrying someone who has a similar size nose to me. Thankfully my husband is proud of his nose so being asked this question isn’t really an issue for either of us. One night I relayed the story of my nose getting in the way when giving my son a kiss to my husband. We laughed. Then we tried to kiss each other without our noses touching the other’s face. Don’t worry this isn’t descending into some weird story about me and my husband kissing but let me tell you with the size of our noses it is really difficult to kiss without our noses touching the other person’s face!!! Now enough about that and onto the more interesting stuff.

What is interesting is that my son had an ongoing fascination around faces, in particular facial features and everything that comes with them.  If you have read my other posts you will see he was very inquisitive about rugby players ears, he spent a lot of time wondering whether he had one eye or two eyes and he was concerned about his throat and his brain. He has a nervous habit of picking at his lips, he does it in his sleep, when he’s thinking and when he’s relaxing. One day after eating toast he shouted out 

“My lips are so soft from that toast” 

I pondered on this and wondered how on earth did toast make your lips soft. It was only after eating a slice of toast myself that I realized that the butter that was on the toast had made my lips soft. Not once in 40 years had I ever realized it. Now everytime I ate toast, thanks to my son, I did realize it. And now so will you. And so did he. Every single time he ate toast he would touch his lips after and talk about how soft they were. 

His senses around his facial features also seemed to be heightened. There are many times he refuses to eat food as “my teeth are hurting”. And watching him eat is a painful process. His first bite of anything is the tiniest bite known to man, the second bite ever so slightly bigger, the third bite bigger and so on and so on. It’s like he has to build up to the touch of it in his mouth!! 

Smell is a another ongoing event for him…he smells everything. Books, food, clothes, toys. He will sniff it before using it or touching it. And if it doesn’t smell right it’s a no from him. He got some hand-me downs from his cousin, football kits and football training clothes which he loved. But he has yet to wear it as he says it smells like his cousin. I have washed it in our washing powder but still he won’t wear it. 

At bedtime sometimes he will outright refuse to sleep in his bedding “as it doesn’t smell right”. For a while at bedtime I would do a full bed change to accommodate him which at the end of the day was an effort.. . especially after picking them books!!! Now I’m a bit more savvy to his ways I keep a bottle of aftershave in his room, a smell he likes so if he moans about his bed we spray it with a smell he likes and this does the job nicely. 

With most of these little quirks of his I have found a workaround. Spray things so he likes the smell of it, cut his food up in tiny pieces so he can build up to the feel of it in his mouth, don’t force him in to eating if his teeth are “hurting” or offer him something soft, reassure him about his eyes and so on and so on. And a lot of the time I am proud of myself for coming up with little workarounds that make tiny bits of his life easier to deal with. I can spend hours thinking of ways to make his life (and mine) easier.  The one thing I am struggling to find a workaround with is the size of my nose. I am stuck with it, and so is he unfortunately!!