What came first, the booger or the scab?

Finn has developed a new favorite hobby.  The good:  it's free and he really seems to enjoy it.  The bad:  he hasn't yet learned that you're only supposed to enjoy it in the privacy of your own totally exposed car in rush hour traffic, like your Daddy.

No, it's not head-banging to vintage Winger. It's picking his nose.

And he REALLY likes it.  I estimate that Kitty and I now spend roughly 1/3 of our lives smacking his hand away from his face, since the Positive Discipline books don't have a chapter on resolving this through love and/or logic.

The issue isn't so much that he's picking his nose, but that he's doing it really poorly.  He'll be blatantly mining for gold at the restaurant dinner table, he'll be picking a winner right before grabbing a toy at the playground, he'll be исследовать просторы носа/ноздрей - which apparently is a Russian euphemism for digging boogers out of your face - right before grabbing a grabbing a piece of food out of a shared bowl/bag.

And it's not just that he's doing it in so obvious a fashion, but that he's also apparently injuring himself in the act.  We've noticed that he's now got a scab in his go-to right nostril.  I believe that the scab is a result of his energetic snot mining.  Kitty maintains that it's the itchiness of the scab that is causing him to appear to be picking his nose.

I fear that this disagreement may continue well into Finn's adulthood.

Perhaps while we await the ultimate resolution of that discussion, I can teach him the ol' stealth pretend-to-be-scratching-your-nose move to at least cut down on the public embarrassment.

Plus, if he's taking a more modest approach, he'll be far less likely to seriously injure himself while head-banging to vintage Winger in the car. It certainly works for me.