I Can't Handle the Tooth!

The other day, October 20th, I received an email from my mother. It was sent in playfully frustrated commemoration of the 1 month since my last blog entry. Let me just say that that was the fastest month I have ever experienced in my life to date. And that it was all my daughter's fault. Sort of. I'll explain that in a later post.

But reading that email I couldn't help thinking that I had become the new emblem of the bad son in the 21st Century digital age. I don't write, I don't call, I don't blog!. . .Some day I'll have Internet junkie kids just like me and then I'll know! I'll be on their Myspace page posting in all caps, "DON'T MIND ME, I'M JUST YOUR FATHA!", trying to type in my best New York Jewish accent.

Anyway, last night I come home late from a video job taping a football game and freezing my nether regions off in an unseasonable cold October night, and I pulled up about the time the wife is getting home from play rehearsal. They introduced costumes to the rehearsal process last night, and the first costume night in every rehearsal I've known has had a tendency to derail everything and cause that rehearsal to go about twice as long as usual. Such was the reason for her late arrival home. We both parked our cars and met in the driveway to walk up the front walk together. Before we even reached the porch steps we could see it through the glass storm door---a handmade sign pinned to the front door, red lettering on a white piece of printer paper. It reads: "I Lost a Tooth!", and was signed by Robo.

Getting home so late meant the kids were long in bed, and it seems Robo was thinking ahead and didn't want to miss that evenings chance for the obligatory cash reward, bounty for the contents of a plastic baggie placed under his pillow. Actually, the note said "I lost a Toot!" to match the play baby talk he enjoys annoying us with when he's feeling goofy.

Well, this has been the week of the tooth for us it seems. As we got in, the wife went down to put the dollar under Robo's pillow and I scrounged up two bucks to put under Leemer's. He'd lost both of his top two front teeth at the same time earlier that same day. They'd both been loose for over a week, and each day he'd come to me and ask me to yank on them to see if I could coax them free. I did, and they were never quite loose enough.

Just about a day ago I was getting him ready for bed and after brushing he came to me, ready to have the nightly pull attempt conducted. I did, and while still I couldn't pull either tooth out, one of them started to bleed after I gave it my best shot. At that point I discovered something new about my son---the taste of his own blood makes him gag. I know blood isn't the best taste in the world, but it's not like drinking curdled milk either, in my experience. But you would have thought it was by his reaction. He stood over this sink, spitting and sputtering, his head leaned forward and down so the blood wouldn't go into his mouth as it dripped, until the white sink was fully decorated by tiny red spots. After a settled moment examining the carnage in the sink bowl, you could see him begin to wonder what he must look like. He slowly lifted his head to the mirror to discover the red striping in the channels between all of his teeth and smiled, exposing even more of the reddened teeth, and he commented on how that was the coolest thing he'd ever seen.

It took a stray bouncy ball off of the neighbors basement pool table hitting him in the face to finally pop them out. He was quite pleased to finally be free of them. The next morning, there he was, smiling up at me like a double barreled Alfred E. Newman, trying to figure out a way to say his "th"s now. Coupled with the Peter Pan haircut he's grown out, I don't think he's ever had a more appropriate visage. I'll post photos as soon as I finish the roll. I think I've mentioned I'm taking analog photos now that the Bear gave our digital camera a fling on to the front sidewalk this last July.

Speaking of photos and the Bear, I'm dieing to post photos of him in his new glasses. Everyone who sees him in them thinks he looks like the kid from Jerry Maguire . I've been trying to teach him to say, "Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?", a famous quote of the kid from that movie. I'm definitely not teaching him the kid's other and perhaps more famous quote from the movie (caution--some not-safe-for-work language in this video clip).

We're still not sure if the glasses are the right prescription or not. Eye doctors, of course, rely a lot on feedback from the patient in making their decisions and what lenses to give a person---"Does A look better? Or B? A? Or B?"----and honestly, I'm not sure that Bear has the whole give and take of conversational expectations down. He may have just been commenting on which new way of seeing things was more interesting to him at that moment, which may have been the fuzzier or more distorted way. Or he may have just liked the way the letter B sounded right then and thought it would be fun to say. But when the office assistant gave us the glasses, she said with an endearing tone to my wife, "He's going to be able to see you for the first time". This was meant to be charming, touching the heart to think that there is a whole new level of intimacy we'll be able to share with our little boy. But the actually effect was to excite concern because we know he hasn't been that blind this whole time.

But we still can't tell for sure, one way or the other. He doesn't complain about them when he has them on, and he'll watch T.V. through them, but they seem to make him a little off balance and not be able to point directly at things in books without a little more effort than usual guiding his finger to just the right point. He never did that before. We've been trying to talk to him about them to see if we can get more feed back on how the world looks to him through the glasses, but the only thing remotely constructive we've gotten is once he was looking over the glasses and then through them, back and forth, going "big mommy, little mommy". We're still not sure what to derive from that.

At any rate, the tooth loosing comes after a shock earlier this week when we took Leemur to the dentist because he was complaining about some pain in his jaw. We thought perhaps one filling. The dentist said that he needed seven. Seven! Which, of course, was going to cost a zillion dollars! My wife was so overwhelmed she broke into tears right there in the office. We have been going crazy trying to get this sewer thing financed, and now this on top--it was too much for her to think about. I'm glad for every tooth he looses now because it's another one I don't have to worry about filling.

And we've tried everything to try and keep him brushing regularly. All the trick, and the punishments, and toys, and doing it ourselves with his head in our laps. And still---seven fillings. His brother Robo was in earlier in the month after a filling he had popped out. They ended up pulling the tooth because it was his other teeth crowding that caused the filling to come loose in the first place. I still can't believe we gave him a dollar for that tooth. I'd already paid for it in spades once.

But God is good, and it looks like we'll have a couple things coming in that will give us enough money for the sewer and the dentist, both. Just.

In all this I've learned that there is one forbidden question---"what's next"? Because that's a question that always seems to get answered.