Snaggle Puss

 

 

There are times in your children's lives that one must use a little force to get them to do what is necessary. To take a case in point, my five-year-old daughter had an extremely loose tooth this week. It was so loose that you could see the very large permanent tooth peaking though the gum line. When she spoke the tooth--which was on the top--would wiggle and cause her to speak with a sort of lisp in her voice. It was driving me nuts and I decided to take some action to extract the tooth. I knew that if I could just get her to sit still, then I could get the little pearl out of her mouth. This would not be an easy task and would require some deviousness on my part.

Granted, I know that it may seem somewhat scary to a little girl that her mother wants to hold her down and pull her tooth. After all , I was a little girl once too and I remember well being told that I needed to tie a string around my tooth and then attach the string to the door handle and give it a hard slam. Wasn't every kid told that when they had a very loose tooth? I wanted to avoid traumatizing my daughter though, so I enlisted the help of her big brother. He has already lost all of his baby teeth and knows the ways of the force. I felt pretty assured that Kyle could talk his little sister into to sitting still long enough so that he could get his grubby boy hands into her mouth and pull that tooth out.

I gathered them into Katie's bedroom at bedtime for our usual bedtime stories and asked for Katie to show us her wiggly tooth. She pushed it forward with her tongue and I could see specks of blood. It was ready to come out! I asked her if she would let me pull it and she emphatically replied, "No!" Naturally, I backed off and then suggested that she let her brother take a look at the tooth. I told her that since he had lost all of his baby teeth, he was now a pro at pulling teeth. Somehow, this sounded comforting to her and she laid down and opened her mouth wide for her brother to see the tooth. First, Kyle twisted the so that it hung crooked in her mouth. It was a funny sight for sure! We were laughing so hard that Katie completely lost all of her fear. Since the tooth was now twisted out of position, it absolutely had to come out. I told Katie to lie back down so that Kyle could pull the tooth. He reached right into her mouth and pulled that little tooth out. Both of the children jumped up in the excitement of it all, ready for the tooth fairy to visit. My plan was a success!