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.

The Great Gender Revelation

So...today was the great Gender Revelation - VERY eagerly anticipated in our household.

I had heard of this great idea of how to tell your family about the gender of the baby: make a cake - blue if it's a boy, pink if a girl - and frost it white. When the cake is cut, all is made known in the twinkling of an eye.

So I bought two cakes today - a white one to mix with blue food coloring, if required, and a strawberry cake mix.

Brad had today off and so he got to accompany us to the ultrasound. HURRAY! When we went in to the doctor's office, the nurse welcomed us and said to Aiden, "So...! A boy or a girl... Which do you want?" Aiden said with a big smile, "I want a lollipop!" He has always gotten lollipops there before, so it was perfectly logical to expect one today. The nurse was quite amused...and Aiden got his desired lollipop.

At one point in the ultrasound before the gender had been revealed, I squinted at the screen and said, " Oh... are they ( I don't know why I used THAT pronoun because it was clearly ONE person there) sucking their thumb?" And she said, "No... that shows...that you're having a girl." Okay! Talk about getting the WRONG end of things! I guess I will not try to take up being an ultrasound technician anytime soon! I really don't know how I got THAT from THAT. But you know ultrasounds - to the layperson, it's kind of anybody's guess most of the time.

It didn't seem like a great big deal to Aiden - whenever we've asked him in the past, he has always said, "A gol." ( Translation: a girl.) So he was very matter of fact about the news - it wasn't news to him.

So we came home and I mixed up the strawberry cake, feeling very, very happy.

Now comes the fun part of deciding on a name. We had decided on a boy's name but in the girl department, we are far from decided.

This evening when some of our family assembled for the cutting of the cake, we were joined via the miracle of video Skype by Liane and her kids...who had assembled with great big signs, voting for the gender of their choice; the majority leaned towards the male persuasion. Sorry, nephews - girls are making a comeback in the family!

So - there's our big news! Thanks for sharing our joy!

Lessons my Son Taught Me (about how wrong I can be)

Sometimes I think I have amnesia. Like the time I awoke about one o'clock in the morning and heard sounds of crashing and running coming from downstairs. Brad was beside me, asleep. I instantly concluded it was ROBBERS. Of course! And then the robber started running upstairs...and in my half-wakeful, fully terrified, totally illogical state, I suddenly knew it was a dog. Yes, a dog had somehow broken in to our house. This was not my finest hour in the reasoning department. And then, I heard the dog open Aiden's door. So I went back to thinking it was a robber. Only it was about to become a kidnapper! All this happened in the space of about three seconds, it seemed, and I was shaking Brad's arm, trying to wake him up. He knew instantly that it was just Aiden. Why couldn't I have thought of that? Seriously, the thought had hardly even entered my head. Oh yeah. I have a child. Children do these things. The only thing is, when heard in the dead of night, the pitter-patter of little feet tend to transmogrify into the clump-clump of burglars.

Aiden came in all distressed and disoriented and I was still sort of in terrified/angry at the kidnapper/fight or flight mode...which weirdly and instantly turned into comforting, motherly mode as soon as I heard his voice. A wrenching and disconcerting transition for one o'clock a.m.

It turns out that Aiden had woken up, was thirsty, didn't have his drink beside his bed ( my fault), and so got up, opened his door, closed his door ( both of which should have woken me up), and went downstairs to forage. It's not quite been two months since he graduated from a crib to a big boy bed, and even though he has gotten up out of bed several times, this was the first time he had done it after I was asleep. That is all to say, in my defense, I'm still getting used to another person around the house who is potentially nocturnally mobile.

And then there was the time I found a small piece of plum sitting on a kitchen chair. I looked in the fruit bowl and lo and behold, there was a plum with a small bite missing. For some reason, my brain instantly condemned Brad. I formed this mental picture of him taking a bite and deciding it wasn't ripe enough and spitting it out. I don't know why I had this rush to judgment - it's not like he does this kind of thing often! And as I held the plum in my hand, I shook my head and said in a quiet, slightly exasperated tone, "Brad...!" Aiden looked up at me and said quite penitently, "I bite it, Mama." It reduced me to hysterical laughter on the spot. I just love that he owned up to it immediately, when he could have gotten away with it. When I told Brad, he thanked Aiden for not throwing him under the bus. ( Hmmm- a violent idiom for a two year old to puzzle over.)

I just felt like clonking myself over the head - DUH, CLAIRE! You have a two year old boy! Those are the kind of creatures who climb up on kitchen chairs and take big bites out of plums and spit them out. That's practically in their job description!

It's just funny how our brains are constantly trying to solve mini-mysteries, struggling to instantly make sense out of what we see, or hear ( as in the case of the midnight marauder who turned out to be my son), and in my case anyway, the conclusions are not always correct.

And on a totally unrelated note - we were reading a Dora the Explorer book tonight before bedtime. ( For the lucky few who are uninitiated in the ways of this fictional wunderkind, I will explain. Dora is a bilingual cartoon child who leads a shrill crusade to teach the Spanish language to young Anglo urchins everywhere.)(No un-politically correct comments from the peanut gallery, please. Yes, I agree, we shouldn't have to press 1 to hear something in English... but on the other hand, it really doesn't send our beloved country to the dogs to learn a little Spanish. Trust me. ) I was reading a Dora story to Aiden about how Dora says goodnight to a host of animals, bilingually, of course. "Goodnight snakes! Buenos Noches, culebras!"( What normal little girl says Goodnight to snakes? Well, at least now I will never forget the Spanish word for snakes. Oh goodie - another useless brain wrinkle.) Anyway- with each "goodnight" I would prompt Aiden to say, "Buenos noches!" And his utterance of the phrase was so cute, that I knew if I could bottle that cuteness and sell it, I would be an instant millionaire. As I wrote on my Facebook status: " I think the sound of Aiden saying "Buenos Noches" as I turn out the light is sweet enough to melt the stony heart of the cruelest despot."