Breaking Bad to the rescue!
This morning the weather was nice so I took the N00b into the garden to do a bit of work. We were planning to mow the lawn, dig up a few weeds, plant a few bulbs and maybe measure our giant pumpkin because N00bs love giant veg.
Alas, while I was plucking some particularly recalcitrant weeds up from under the cherry tree, I noticed that the n00b was eating something. I ordered her to spit it out, but it was too late: "All gone mummy." she told me. "Yuck."
I looked at her hands, which were full of suspicious red berries. "Where did you get those, darling?" I asked, trying to keep the apprehension out of my voice.
She pointed to the flowerbed where hundreds of lilies of the valley had finished blooming, and bought forth a lovely crop of delightful red berries.
Well, Shit.
I'd known lily of the valley was poisonous since I was only a little bit older than my daughter, but I'd always thought that it was poisonous like cotoneasters were poisonous. Which is to say if you ate some they'd be nasty, and then you'd have an unpleasant day of your body purging them back out again by every possible method, but you wouldn't die. Then I'd watched Breaking Bad, where (spoiler alert) lily of the valley is used to fake an attack of Ricin poisoning. If it's good enough to look like Ricin it's obviously pretty darn toxic, and I'd resolved to dig all of mine up as soon as I was no longer heavily pregnant, just in case the TV was telling the truth.
Before we started panicking and racing to A&E, I phoned up 111 to double-check that lily of the valley is in fact a deadly poison, and not just a convenient plot device. Sadly, they confirmed that the Toxin Database lists it as right up there with foxgloves in the list of things you do not ever want your toddler to swallow. They told us to go straight to A&E and not to induce vomiting. Luckily for us it appears that the N00b only ate the one berry that I caught her eating, though of course since I couldn't tell how many she might have eaten before she was caught, the poor little mite did have to have an EEG and blood-work and be constantly monitored by pediatricians for six hours.
After the most stressful six hours of my life, we're all back safe and sound. N00b got a little bit of a temperature and a little bit of a tummy ache, but got to watch a lot of Peppa Pig and eat a lot of chocolate buttons while wired up to a machine that went 'ping', so while we were experiencing all the dread parental terrors, she was very well amused. My father has offered to help me dig up the offending flowerbed this Friday and salt the earth or whatever else it takes to stop the little buggers coming back. The N00b is too young to have learned not to eat things without asking, but I have certainly learned to check my garden more thoroughly for deadly deadly poison. We have had a lucky escape, and I must add another stiff double brandy to the list of drinks I am owed as soon as I am no longer enceinte...