My children, for some reason, do not like to lose their baby teeth. That's at least what an examination of the track record would seem to indicate. Alpha lost the last of his teeth when he was 14. For over a year before that, he had shark-like double rows of molars (okay, imperfect analogy--sharks don't have grinding molars--but it was really odd seeing teeth jutting outward from his gums). Bravo still has a bunch of baby teeth left to lose, none of them are loose, and he turns 14 this fall. Charlie has a long way to go. Delta has now lost five or six teeth, but it's been slow going. She lost one of the front teeth shortly after Christmas. In the intervening two months, the other front tooth has gradually gotten looser and looser, but she really didn't want to have it pulled until it was basically hanging by a thread.
Well, this week, I convinced her that it was loose enough to come out. To tell the absolute truth, it had been gradually moving toward the center of her mouth. It was quite strange-looking. Anyway, she agreed to have it pulled out, which I took care of. (Turns out it was still connected pretty well to the root on the back side of the tooth, but the connection to the gum/flesh was minimal, so the bleeding stopped pretty quickly. Echo was in the bathroom with us when Delta shrieked, and the two of them had a fine freak-out together--my ears are still ringing two nights later.)
Well, with both teeth out, Delta is just as cute as any six-year-old with two missing front teeth can be. I keep wondering why that is. I mean, think of a hockey player missing the same two teeth--not exactly attractive. What is it about little kids and missing teeth (as opposed to adults with missing teeth) that is cute? As with just about everything, I have a theory on this--it's empathy. "All I want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth" is not exactly a musical masterpiece, but it continues to endure and we all know the lyrics because we can all easily imagine a little kid with that wide expanse of toothlessness asking Santa to deliver some relief from the inability to eat solid foods without cutting them up.
To be precise, just about every one of us has been there, unless of course, you were even more reluctant to lose those baby teeth than my kids. The summer I lost my front teeth happened to be a summer in which Gramsey cooked up a bunch of corn (that is to say, we had corn on the cob pretty frequently). Consequently, I missed out on pretty much an entire summer of getting butter all over my cheeks and chin, because Pop handled the processing of my corn every time we had it--he'd butter it up, salt it, then cut the kernels off in long strips onto my plate. It was just as tasty and nutritious, I'm sure, but not nearly as fun to eat. Anyway, it remains a vivid memory for me--I did try a couple of times to eat the corn off the cob, with dismal results. And with that vivid memory flashing through my mind, I see Delta trying to eat apples, and I completely understand her frustration and wish there were some way to fix the problem for her.
Without belaboring the point, I'd love to hear from others what memories they have of their own, or their children's, toothlessness.
