"Teeth,

They are very much worthwhile. They must be very much in style!" That line has been going through my head all day. It is, of course, from Dr. Seuss' "The Tooth Book". Addy started teething yesterday, and when Addy is getting teeth, it is NO FUN! Liam was an easy peasy teether, no worries, no fuss. But Addy. Addy is another story entirely. Each time she cuts a tooth (in this case, 2) she gets a raging fever, a horrible diaper rash, and the crankies, which on a scale of 1 to 10 would be a 23. She wakes up every hour on the hour at night, so maybe you can add this up for me: sleep deprived, aching toothed baby+sleep deprived, aching bodied mom= ? Or maybe if it was an elementary school math word problem, it would look something like this: "Addison, a 13 month old baby girl, is teething her back 2 teeth, which are always the hardest to get in anyway. At night, when the other family members in the house who are *not* teething are trying to sleep, Addison wakes up every hour on the dot. If it takes her mother 15 minutes to get her back to sleep, how much sleep is her mother getting? Addison goes to bed at 7:30 and wakes up at 7 a.m. at the first sign that there may be sun peeking through her blinds." I don't know what the answer is, I'm too tired to compute it, but if you do, don't tell me, because it will just make me more tired to hear the mathematical equivalent of my fatigue.
In other toothy news, I had a cavity filled this morning and my baby tooth, my only claim to uniqueness and fame among my peers, pulled. I have put the tooth pulling off for about 2 years, because, you know, that whole-yanking-on-something-in my-mouth-thing doesn't sound so...fun. But it happened so fast I didn't even know he had pulled it. However, he was quite chatty and kept asking me questions that required long answers, while he had the numbing needle in my mouth. After he had numbed my mouth, he told me to sit up and he would be back in about 10 minutes, to give the anesthetic time to take real good. I sat up, in a kind of nervous stupor, (because needles plus my mouth equals hives and sweaty hands) and he goes "You don't like to talk, do you?". What I said was "I cant talk! My mouth feels really weird!" What I was thinking was "I love to talk, I talk all the time, except, you know, for the times that there IS A 3 INCH NEEDLE IN MY MOUTH!". They got done with the whirring torture devices and stuck a piece of gauze in my mouth to blot the small amount of blood from the extraction (which was in the very front of my mouth), and then they made me walk out of there like that! I was like "are you sure you want me to do that? I dont wanna scare the kids in the waiting room. They'll take one look at me with that bloody gauze hanging out of my mouth and decide that going to the dentist isn't such a good excuse for missing school, after all." When I got home I took some me-time with my best friend Blue Bell Cookies and Cream, which tastes the same even if my chewing and swallowing capabilities are diminished, thank goodness. And now that I think about it, my deep love of Cookies n Cream is probably a contributing factor in the appearance of the cavity, but I figure that's what brushing and flossing were invented for.