My poor baby

We just returned from Aiden's first visit to the dentist. Brad can take him to every single appointment in the future.

It started out with normal issues of wriggling and not opening wide enough for the technician to cram the x-ray plates in his mouth... The cleaning went fine, but then when the main dentist arrived to address my concerns with one of his front teeth which was showing a gray discoloration, the real nightmare began.

Apparently, some time in the last couple months, Aiden fell and bonked his mouth on something - not too hard to believe, considering he is a three year old. Well, according to the 2 X-rays that the technician was able to take, his front two teeth were fractured, enough for one of them to sustain damage to the root...and an infection had set in, which could negatively affect the adult tooth behind it...so the dentist declared that we pull the infected tooth. WHAT?! He's barely three years old! After my initial shock, I arranged for the extraction to happen immediately. They said they couldn't sedate him because he had already eaten breakfast, but they would have to use a local anesthetic, with a "papoose board" for "behavior management." So basically, they were going to strap him down. Greeaat. It just gets better and better.

And then they told me that I had to wait in the waiting room. That reduced me to tears. I know it was probably all for the best, but still - it was hard. I don't know what would be worse - watching the necessary torture and not being able to do anything, or being separated from the situation, like I was. The people in the office were so nice. One of the back-room paperwork ladies let me hang out in her office and gave me tissues.

I am still recovering from being a little bit of a mess. I don't like pain much myself - but dealing with my child's pain - even the PROSPECT of his pain - is a whole new world of awfulness that I did not handle very well. I feel a little stupid - like I over-reacted. It was just a tooth pull, for Pete's sake. But, at the same time...my mother instincts tell me I'm NOT over-reacting. He's a three year old. It was a little traumatic.

Oh my poor baby. He had obviously shed a few tears, and was quite confused about his numb lips...And now he has a gaping hole in his mouth...which is sort of cute, and also sort of gives me punch in the gut whenever I glimpse it. Weird combination. The adult tooth won't grow in for quite a while...

The dentist has given us the option of a temporary fake tooth thingy - mostly for aesthetic reasons, (but he also mentioned speech development as a factor to consider) but because Aiden still sucks his thumb at night, it probably won't happen - at least not right now. So he'll be sporting a premature jack o'lantern look for a while.

We went to Wal-Mart and I let him pick out some ice-cream. He picked strawberry.
( Really? Strawberry? Okay. Whatever.) He fell asleep on the way home.

So we've had quite the stressful morning. Quite the week too- what with ice-storms and potty-training. And I thought January would be boring.