CityView Magazine

10 September 2022 FAMILY MATTERS What you really need to know about baby teeth BY CL AIRE MULLEN On what page of the Dr. Spock book are the instructions for navigating simultaneously pulling over on a dirt road, applying pressure to a bloody socket out of view of a toddler brother, locating a needle in a haystack, and calming a child wailing over the whereabouts of her tooth and worrying over how the Tooth Fairy deals with teeth that have been lost in both the figurative and literal sense? It never occurred to me that my child would choose bedtime on the night before the first day of school to go into Oscar- worthy theatrics over the state of a front tooth that had dangled by a thread for weeks, yet she refused to let anyone touch it. ere were tears. ere was great concern over a new classmate teasing her about her cattywampus tooth. ere was a solemn vow to go the entire first day without talking or smiling. Our daughter went to bed fully intending to start second grade with her front tooth hanging at a 75-degree angle. I didn't think that along with first-day school jitters I'd also experience overnight child choking hazard terror, leaving my husband and me to pull off what I like to think is one of the greatest accomplishments of our 14 years of marriage: extracting a I 'm winging this parenting thing as best I can. I've had some experiences that I sometimes feel obliged to share in the event that my trials and errors (and occasional triumphs and exultations) might help my fellow child- rearers. So, let's talk about baby teeth. What we all generally know and understand is that kids get teeth. Teeth get loose. Teeth fall out. e Tooth Fairy comes. But what no one tells you, or maybe everyone failed to tell me, is that sometimes when your kid gets teeth, the pointy upper canines can and do sometimes come in before the middle two teeth, leaving you with a smiley, 1-year- old baby Dracula nowhere near Halloween. I also don't think I quite understood the vast quantity of sleep that two people and one drooly, miserable baby will lose over the growing pains that baby teeth can cause. And before it was actually our turn to deal with the tooth-loss stage, I envisioned my dentist husband expertly extracting every wiggly tooth in the comfort of our own bathroom with a clean washcloth and one gentle twist. Ha. What nothing prepared me for was my child yanking out her own tooth in the car in the middle of nowhere on the way home from a remote hiking trail (no dentist dad in sight) and promptly dropping the tiny tooth on the floor of our SUV, which was littered with what seemed like thousands of crumbs of white cheddar popcorn that bore an uncanny resemblance to, yes, her tooth. tooth from the mouth of a child without so much as a flinch from my ninja-dentist husband or his slumbering patient. I can't say the same for the lady holding the flashlight, but we got that sucker out and our second-grader woke up on the first day of school to a gap in her mouth, a crisp dollar bill under her pillow, and the incredible idea that her tooth had been pulled in her sleep by none other than the ultimate dental professional: the Tooth Fairy herself. And while we're on the subject of the Tooth Fairy, there are a few things you novice parents ought to know. Apparently, the Tooth Fairy has evolved. We're not talking about the old-school TF of my day who predictably le one single, shiny silver dollar under my pillow from the time I lost my first primary incisor until the day in late elementary school that my mom sat me down and instructed me to open an old jewelry box of hers that I discovered, with great devastation, contained dozens of pearly teeth that once were in the mouths of my three siblings and me. Did you know that the Tooth Fairy of 2022 (who clearly has a Pinterest account) takes teeth and leaves behind everything from glitter dollars to tiny letters scrawled in Did you know that the Tooth Fairy of 2022 (who clearly has a Pinterest account) takes teeth and leaves behind everything from glitter dollars to tiny letters scrawled in fairy language to corked bottles of fairy dust, and, in maybe the most amazing of all cases, 20 whole bucks for a single tooth? Do you want to know how I know this? Because kids at the lunch table told my daughter so.

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