Thursday, August 02, 2012

Odontophobics Look Away Now



 For weeks now I have been finding it tricky to go for my run in the mornings.  Too cold, you ask?  Well, yes, but that's not the reason.  The reason is Ted.  The child can hear a door hinge move silently without pushing the air in front of it - the sound of which will cause him to sit bolt upright and yell out "MAMA!".  He also has a penchant for waking up in the middle of the night (I was going to link to a post about that, but hey, pretty much any post I wrote for all of 2011 will feature his sleepless nights).  He will come into our bedroom and I will pick him up and we will both lie together, snuggled up and warm. Lovely, yes.  Conducive to rising up for a 5.30am run?  Not at all.  

So after becoming increasingly frustrated by having to leave my running gear by the back door untouched, I decided to have a chat with Ted about this.  Ted is a notoriously terrible waker (be sure to read that carefully).  It takes him forever, he cries and writhes and moans and takes anything up to an hour to wake fully after falling into a reasonable sleep.  It's really tiresome to be honest. So I sat him down and we chatted about why he wakes up in the middle of the night to come and find me.  

Turns out - it's monsters.  Poor little guy hates the dark and is scared of monsters.  Who would have thought?  I have no idea at all where this has emerged from, we had nothing of the sort from Harriet, so it's very left field.  I feel terrible for not realising it sooner.  So we discussed solutions and Ted told me he'd like an anti-monster light.  

Off we drove to IKEA.  It was, of course, a whole three minute drive (and we used the car because we were off somewhere else afterwards).  Ted chose this stick-on LED lights.  And not only did he choose one...he chose three.  Plus one for Harriet to have so she can read after Ted's off to sleep.  The slight drawback to this is these lights are BRIGHT.  And I mean they emit a spotlight you could coax a confession out with. And I look straight into them when I'm putting Ted to sleep.  Harriet cried about having them on the first night and I had to wait until Ted dropped off, turn it off so that Harriet could sleep and then turn one back on again when I went to bed so that Ted could have it on in the night when he woke.  He now literally sleeps under a light that could easily be mistaken for a sunbed.  And he hasn't woken for a week now.  Woot!

Being able to prioritise my running again has been awesome.  Sure it means sacrificing sleep and having early nights and the like, but it's just SO beneficial for me in terms of my state of mind.  It calms me.  It centres me.  If I don't run then I get my grumpy pants on much more easily. Bring on the run!

Harriet's news of note is that she had a tooth extraction and filling last week.  Luckily Lou lives two blocks away from our new dentist extraordinaire, so I was able to leave Ted with her while I sat next to Harriet throughout the process.  We walked down to the dental surgery and Harriet was excited - happy excited.  




 

 Seriously, this dentist is great with children.  The whole process took an hour and there was not a peep from Harriet about anything - no pain, no anxiety, no nerves.  She was involved with the process at each step, knew what was happening, what each instrument felt like and looked like and said she had fun.  Fun!




Here's Dr David the Dentist wrist deep in mouth.  He had to drill away most of one tooth and extract another.   He moved into the abscess that had formed above the tooth root so that it could drain and made comment on how the removal of that would assist with her health for the MRI.  *facepalm* Of course it would!


 

 He even let me take a photo!  This is after having the drill - you can see better if you click on the image.  The tooth situated more to the front of her mouth was the one removed. 






We have to go back in (obviously after pay day *sigh*) to have the tooth on the opposite side extracted as well.  You can see on the rad here where I've circled, the teeth have an increased lucency, indicating their decay.  If they aren't removed their decreasing size fails to allow enough space for the adult teeth coming in behind them, result in crowding.



Other stuff has been happening too.  I re-covered a couple of the more manky chairs (read: the ones the children love to sit on for dinner).  I've made various items for school events, stewed a lot of apples (which were eaten faster than I could cook them!), written some more and baked some more and made a list of the babies I'm expecting around me in the next twelve months.  The staggering number of baby gifts I am going to have to make is crazy!  I'm planning on starting yesterday.

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