A New Smile

Have you ever just been going along in your day having a normal day when all of a sudden something happens to change that normal day?

I took the kids out to the movies today to see the summer movie, Aliens in the Attic. We all loved it and thought it was pretty funny. Well, except for the parts where Lexi covered her ears because she was convinced something scary was about to happen :)

Anyway, I figured I should take Lexi to the bathroom after the movie because she had a lot of soda and I didn't want her to have an accident on the 5 minute drive home. Nothing out of the ordinary was going on in the bathroom. Lexi was finished and I was washing and drying my hands when she decided to run off towards the door. Of course I asked her to wait for me, but like all kids, she just took off. The next thing I know she's running back to me crying that painful cry and I don't even know what happened.

When I get her calm enough to talk she tells me she got hit with the door. I looked at her mouth and didn't see anything wrong, so I just held her and tried to console her. We went to get the other kids waiting outside the bathroom and that's when Kalin pointed out that she had blood on her mouth. Great!!

So I take a second look at her mouth and notice that her two front teeth are not even and now there's lots of blood. I tried to get a look in her mouth, but she was screaming so much that I could hardly get something in there to stop the bleeding. I resulting to getting ice from the soda machine and just had her suck on it. I helped with the bleeding and with the screaming.

I decided to take her to the urgent care to see if they should see her or if I should take her to the dentist. The nurse said I should take her to the dentist, so I did. By this time I'm out of ice, so there was nothing to keep her happy while we drove from one location to another. Our regular dentist took a few x-rays and referred us to a pediatric dentist down the street.

We took some more x-rays and found out that it was not just the one tooth that was loose, but in fact, she had two fractures and a chipped tooth. Both fractures are above the gum line, so you can't see them, but you can see that her teeth are no longer even with each other.

At least she's still the cutest little thing and a messed up tooth won't change that!!

One tooth is still attached to the root, so the dentist said he gives it a 7 out of 10 chance to survive. The other tooth, not so much, he only gave it a 2 out of 10 chance of survival.

Instead of pulling her tooth right then we decided with the dentist to wait it out and see if it won't heal itself in a few weeks. The hard thing is that she can't put anything on that tooth. Easier said then done for a finger sucker! It was interesting watching her eat her dinner. I had to make sure she put everything into the back of her mouth, so as not to upset those front teeth. We'll know more in a few weeks what's going on. That is unless she hits it again or something else crazy happens. You just never know with how kids are all over the place. Lexi just might have a missing tooth before her 7 year old sister and it might just be missing for a few years.

After she was able to talk about it she was able to tell me that she got hit with the bathroom door in the face. Some "mom", as she called her, was going out of the bathroom and hit her with the door. I'm not sure if Lexi was running towards it while the it was being opened or what because I didn't see what happened, but I doubt the lady even saw her. She's kinda small :)

It's soooo hard when things happen to your kids because you want to cry with them, but you can't because someone has to think straight and make sure they're taken care of. Also, you wonder what you could have done differently in your day so that incident didn't have to happen. It's better just to chalk it up to "things happen" and go on with life.

There's no way I can protect them from every little thing in life. I'm just so glad that these are her baby teeth and that she's feeling much better now. So resilient, you wouldn't even know something traumatic happened to her today if you saw her playing with her brother and sister tonight :)

*pics taken 07/13/2010