A Very Long Post About One (Miserable) Little Tooth

It was five years ago when I stood Bentley on the bathroom counter of our apartment to brush his teeth.  He was almost two, and I was proud of myself for successfully giving him his bath, a task I had given up while pregnant with Kendra.  But Craig was over at our newly purchased house, frantically trying to get it livable before we moved in.  So bath time was up to me again.  And it had gone just fine.  Until Bentley took a step backwards off that counter and knocked his mouth against it on his way down.  I held him, still wrapped up in a towel, over the tub to catch the blood, but soon realized that this was upsetting him as much as the fall, so we moved to the changing table so I could get him dressed and resume calming him down.

And that's when I noticed that one of his front teeth was missing.

And that's when I called Craig and begged him to come home and help me out with the mess I'd created.  We drove off to Urgent Care in Falls Church in the middle of the night while my in-laws (who'd been at the house helping Craig) stayed with Kendra.  We got lost.  We wondered, as Bentley oohed and aahed over a passing train if the trip was even necessary.  We were all up way too late.  And the gist of it all was, "Yup, he knocked out his tooth."

This was taken the very next day.  This is gross, but I'm pretty sure that's blood all around his mouth (I didn't want to hurt him more by washing it off)

And that was that.

Halloween just a couple months later, sporting a gap-toothed grin

Or so I thought.  Until a few weeks later, when I was spooning oatmeal into his mouth and saw-- to my horror-- that there was something there on his gums!  And within a few weeks, that tooth had come right back again, although now very crooked.  Natalie's father-in-law, a pediatric dentist, had warned me that this happens frequently.  When you can't find the tooth, it often means that it's simply been slammed back up inside the gums, he explained.  {Cringe}  I'd tried to get x-rays to see if this was the case, but could never succeed in getting Bentley to hold still enough to get a clear picture.  But now we had irrefutable evidence that this had been the case.

And he's been sporting that crooked tooth, evidence of my incompetence, ever since.  I can't even count the number of times that well-meaning people have asked if he's lost a tooth there, as they eye that gap, and I get to explain all over again what happened.  It's been a lot of fun.

But it all ends now.

Because yesterday that darn tooth finally fell out.  My little baby is finally losing teeth.  The normal way.

But that tooth is still keeping us on our toes.  Because Bentley woke up yesterday to find that it wasn't there.  I was afraid he'd swallowed it in his sleep, but then he managed to find it.  I told him to put it in a bowl so we wouldn't lose it.  And then I promptly forgot and tossed it down the sink when I was doing dishes.  But apparently that tooth is even tougher than our garbage disposal, because Craig was forced to fish it back out of the drain.

That tooth is like a bad penny.

I dutifully put it on Bentley's dresser as promised (he was so worried when I couldn't find it, but was really good about going to bed anyway and trusting that I would find it), and then an hour later removed it and replaced it with money, a la Tooth Fairy.  And my plan now is to just throw the thing away, because holding on to an old, dead tooth is gross.  But somehow I ended up slipping it into my dresser drawer.  Just for now.  Because at this point I'm not sure it won't find its way back to us anyway.  But also because it's hard even for me to believe that after all these years, I can finally be rid of this awful little reminder of the dumb things I can do as a parent.  And it's even harder to see how quickly my little boy is turning into a not-so-little boy...

My still sleepy-- but very excited-- Bentley