Berry Surprise

Yesterday, my sister came up to the Cape to get her hair done. She deposited her child (you may remember her mentioned in earlier works as demon spawn) and left me and my mom to babysit.
Everything was going okay. My sister had returned with her Portia haircut and our family friends had arrived for the weekend. I was strolling with my niece in the front yard, and as I turned away, she picked a berry I did not recognize. I saw her swallow it and almost instantaneously my mind wandered to every movie where children try to kill themselves with poisonous berries (The Hunger Games, The Blue Lagoon, etc.). I screamed to my sister that her child just swallowed something possibly poisonous, sending everyone into a panic.

Clip from "The Hunger Games," berry eating scene

I bent down and tried to explain to her, a two year old, why she should spit the berry out: "Now Z that berry may be poisonous. Poisons are substances that are physiologically harmful to your health." Unsurprisingly, that explanation did not convince her to cough up the berry mush sitting on the base of her tongue (who the f' uses physiological in a conversation with a 2 year old?).
And so I jumped to the next logical course of action, while carrying her towards my sister I rammed my fingers down her mouth in an effort to retrieve the poisonous goo. This only caused her to cry. In fact, as I handed her off to my sister, she gave me the biggest "what in the world are you doing" death glare.
My mom, being the green thumb that she is, had me go down to the garden and find the berry. It turned out to be a beach plum. It's not poisonous. More so, its the main ingredient in some edible jams.

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