Outside the hospital, we tossed pennies into a fountain and made wishes after we had the ultrasound to learn the gender of kid #2.
If I’d had more time to think about it, I would have wished for O.P. to have good teeth. He’s not going to get them from me!
Everyone should have a good story about the time he was thrown in jail, about a near-miss while driving, a broken heart, and a horrific toothache.
Few things humanize someone like a story about a bad toothache: the desperate attempts to drown the pain with alcohol, the reckless consumption of painkillers, the appalling procedures undertaken to eliminate the problem.
I have had teeth pulled, root canals, caps, all that.
The worst thing ever was when I had to have gum removed from the base of a bottom molar so a cap could be put on.
The gum was removed, and much of the tooth removed, WHILE I WAS AWAKE. (Could’ve put me to sleep, dude!) Afterward, I had time before my bus to go to the Washington State Convention Center and recuperate a bit. In the mirror, I saw I had droplets of blood on my face. The people at the office had let me walk out of there with blood on my face. Not awesome!
The worst is over, I thought.
Wrong. The dentist tore into the scorched earth of the gum with a metallic floss thing, scraping it along the sorry, ultra-sensitive stub of a tooth. As I shook with pain, he lectured me on the need for me to do a better job cleaning on my teeth, and said I was going to have to do to myself what he had just done for a week before the cap would go on, and if I didn’t do it right, the cap would have to wait until I did.
I recommend my program of “Ten Minutes For Teeth.” Floss after meals, if possible, getting between the tight bottom and top teeth, reaching as far into the gums as possible, and brush, with an angle to get the bristles up into the gumline, and use a mouthwash, preferably an alcohol-based one. If it doesn’t kill all the germs, maybe it will kill the brain cells of the germs.
I wished for kid #2 to have a good, tight relationship with his older brother.
I hope they both get their teeth from their mother!