My toddler lost a tooth

My child lost a tooth over the weekend, and I'm sure that had she been five or six I would have relished her right of passage into budding childhood but since she is not yet two, I was not overly ecstatic to hear about the incident. As soon as I got word, my mind went wild thinking about the various horrific possibilities. What about infection? Tooth fragments and such?

Besides, I'm a language teacher and I know we rely on our two front teeth for our interdental and labio-dental fricatives like in the words thimble and this or fairy and very. What would become of her speech development? Would she develop a lisp?

Anyway apparently she was sitting in a grown-up chair chugging happily on her sippy cup when she tried to scoot her chair back by pushing on the table with her feet. This trick works in her house but not at the home of the family where she was staying at the time. Instead of scooting back in her chair and getting down from the dining room table, the chair just toppled backward. She lifted her arms possibly to try and catch herself before hitting the floor, and because her tooth was wedged into the slit in the spout on the cup lid, the leverage of her arm along with the cup popped the tooth out clean as a whistle.

Yuck. Parental fears aside, just thinking about how it must have felt gives this dentist phobe the creeps.

Meryl is perhaps lucky that although she wasn't with her parents at the time, she was with my brother and his wife who have successfully raised two kids of their own and were quick to react. They mended her and comforted her the best they could and located the tooth to make sure it was indeed all out. Panicky phone calls were made, tears were shed, blood was mopped up. They even made Meryl scrambled eggs afterward and then gave her a bath.

And when a kid loses a baby tooth, that's all that can be done. I know because I confirmed this on the google. It was the F tooth for those keeping score at home. A maxillary central incisor, but now it's gone.

Well, it's not gone exactly. I have it in a Tupperware container which right now is still on the back seat of the car because I took her along with it to the pediatric dentist this morning. But the tooth is not going back in her mouth.

Taking a toddler to the dentist by the way is not an easy endeavor. While my daughter was quick to sit in the dentist chair, she was not particularly happy to be confined in it. When it came time for the hygienist to take x-rays, I had to sit in the chair with Meryl in between my legs. Then I had to fold my arms across my chest, grab her little hands and hold her legs down with mine. I felt like I was administering a wrestling hold, and let me tell you, my kid can squirm.

Nothing that anyone did to herat the dentist's office today was painful but for someone who's not yet two, I think it's probably scary to have Dad hold you down while two strangers force your jaw down on a bite wing. She also mistook the x-ray machine for a vacuum cleaner, something for which she already harbors an abnormal fear, so after it was all over she was tearfully crying vacuum . . . no . . . vacuum . . . no. Wouldn't you know the first x-rays didn't take which meant we had to go through the whole damn thing again?

She wasn't much more accommodating for the dentist, who himself couldn't have been nicer. Again his exam consisted mostly of wrangling and hog-tying and, at least in theory, looking at her remaining teeth. If I were this guy, I swear I think I would have just pretended to inspect them to appease the accompanying parent. I can't imagine how many times this poor dentist has been bitten.

Eventually Meryl will go back to be fitted with a retainer-like contraption that gets wired and cemented to her two-year molars. When she has two-year molars, that is. The dentist does color matching and bite molding, so school pictures will still feature a full set of nicely aligned pearly whites. All this to the hefty tune of $695. But right now she's without a tooth.

I am slowly warming up to her new smile, but damn, I miss the one she had. I have bad teeth and I wanted my kid to have good teeth, which I guess she does. She just doesn't have all of her good teeth.

Oddly enough though, she doesn't seem to care one way or the other. The next day when I asked her what she did at her aunt and uncle's house she said nonchalantly Bath . . . puppy. So instead I asked her what had happened at the dining room table to which she replied very simply:

Eggs . . .