Glasses!! Between Daddy's bad eyes and Mommy's bad eyes, it's not a real shock, but the eye dr. confirmed that Maia needs glasses. They were buy one get one "free" (yeah, right!) so she got blue AND pink. She is SO excited about them. Here's to hoping they stay in one piece for at least the first week.

OH, and we found the lost train engine Saturday morning. After getting out the new on Friday night...

L

Bad Mommy?

You know what I mean, right? You've had those days where you just KNOW that you have failed on some level as a parent. It's usually something pretty intangible, though, like you yelled a little bit more angrily than you should have or you wished that your kids would just go away for 20 minutes and leave you alone. OR maybe you've experienced the tangible form of this type of failure, like serving hot dogs more than twice in one week for dinner. With no vegetables. These are minor things, really. They happen to all of us (at least, I assume they do... they happen to ME.)

But this week, I experienced something that, for some reason, feels like the most tangible of parental failures that I have yet to experience: Maia had her first cavity.

And this was not just any cavity. No. This was pretty much an entirely rotten tooth. WTF?? I about lost my cookies when I looked in her mouth Friday night and saw that one of her molars was literally a blackish/brownish/grayish color and, well, just rotten! She had complained of it hurting some but we thought it was a sensitivity issue... that and Maia has a tendancy to exaggerate aches and pains to the point that we don't pay much attention to them. And we also thought it was a baby tooth, which I know you still have to take care of but, let's face it, if one of them has a problem you don't worry about it quite as much. In fact, I thought that she still had a molar coming in behind this tooth and that it was probably causing some of the dead look to this smaller molar by infringing on it's roots or something. I knew she'd been eating too much candy and not brushing well enough, but surely this couldn't be just decay I was seeing.

Well, knock me down and call me Sally, because this tooth wasn't just being crowded out and it isn't a baby tooth. NO!!! It's a PERMANENT tooth and it's rotting!! Take me home country roads! I mean, Shad and I do both hail--in the way way back generations--from West Virginia (yes, we are probably cuzins), but having a kid with a rotten tooth is only one step up from owning an outhouse in my book. I was mortified. Horrified. Terrified.

Terrified because a rotten tooth means only one thing. A filling. And that is exactly what we faced on Monday when I took her to the dentist. He said we had to get right to it, and before I had even gotten back from calling the piano teacher to tell her we wouldn't make it, they had pulled out the big needle and were holding her down in the chair to get her numbed up. And looking back on it, maybe it was better that they started it while I was out of the room because my terror might have been too apparent and she might have actually escaped the room instead of just screaming her head off and flailing about like she was a seal ashore without a flipper.

I felt like a total failure. How could this have happened to one of my precious baby's permanent teeth??

Well, ok, I know how it happened. It happened by way of Skittles and Twizzlers and Starburst and Nerd Ropes and Root Beer along with an unhealthy dose of stubborn refusal to brush for more than 20 seconds most of the time. I gave up harrassing her about her bad brushing habits over a year ago. I left it at "You will get cavities and you will have to have a shot in your mouth and they will drill a hole in your tooth." I thought that might scare her enough...just the thought of it. But evidently it took actually having some shots in her mouth and a hole drilled in her tooth (well a hole drilled into the hole that literally was her tooth) to get her to brush more appropriately. This week she has been a fiend for the toothbrushing. Not balking or whining when I say "another minute please" and remembering to get her brush all the way to the back. I think that before she didn't really believe what we told her about cavities, that they could really happen to her. And that scares me more than anything, I think, because it means that she is the type of kid who has to fall on her face first before heeding our advice. Stubborn Irish Lass.

So, maybe when it is all said and done, this is not a total failure on my part. It's not like I'm the one feeding her all the candy. Hello!! They get SO much candy at school these days. And at church! Holy Kit Kats do they ever pass out the sugar at church. Donuts and chocolate milk in Sunday School. Laffy Taffy, suckers, chocolate after the children's sermon in worship. What happened to just being happy with a sticker or a stamp on your hand?? I don't even know where to start with it, and my husband has asked that I please not take on the entire school district about it because he needs the ability to pass out Skittles in the bathroom line every day or the heathen children will not be civil with one another. He has no other way to make them be good anymore. They're not scared of the principals.

Maybe it does take a village to rot a child's teeth! Too bad the "village" couldn't be there when she had her filling done to help me hold her down. Stay tuned for The Filling Part II in a few months when we go back to have the molar re-done with a permanent filling. I do think that it should be Candy Addicted Daddy's turn to go with her then.

Holiday Reporter

Well, we survived the dizzying rush and rumble of the holidays! Nobody got sick. Nobody had any huge meltdowns (at least not on Christmas and not in front of all of our family). Nobody called us out on Santa--although there was a VERY VERY near miss at 10pm Christmas Eve. Maia is even still talking about how she "heard Santa setting up Nate's train set". Shad and I haven't jumped to our feet so quickly in years as we did upon hearing her pop out into the hallway and head into our bedroom to find us not yet in bed. I grabbed her and turned her away from the living room and ushered her right back to bed where she and I laid AWAKE for an hour. By then Santa had finished the train set...

And speaking of the train set, it turned out to be a big hit with Nate. The only problem now being that he has already managed to LOSE the train engine that makes the train go... It's just not nearly as much fun if you have to push the trains and there is no engine. So, I caved and ordered a new remote control engine set yesterday to the tune of $25. I'll admit it is as much for me as it is for him. I actually love this train set business... it is SO FUN. And you can set it up so many different ways! Clearly, I never had one as a child... being a GIRL, of course. That would have been like giving my brother a Holly Hobby doll or something... But even he didn't have a train set. We were trainless, and so the excitement of it is relatively new to me.

All of this begs the question: Where in the frick is that train engine? How could he have already lost it? Santa brought a fabulous LL Bean bag that says "Nate" on the front specifcally for storing the train parts (Santa is very clever like that). The rest of the train parts are there. It was put away a week or so ago and now, BOOM, no engine. I've looked freaking everywhere, too. The fridge. Inside our snow boots (which we may need again by tomorrow morning...). Under the couch, the recliner, beds, blankets. Behind shelves. In Nate's room, Sissy's room, OUR room. Inside bookbags that haven't been used during the break. In the laundry bins. With the tub toys. In the dogfood bag. The train is still M.I.A. I'm beginning to think that Jr. deposited it in the trash can. But asking him is bringing no clues whatsoever. He's not looking sneaky or guilty at all. He seems as perplexed as I am.
And so yesterday I ordered the new train engine. I figure, if nothing else will find the original one, getting a new one will. The chances of it turning up the day before the new one comes in the mail are pretty strong. And if it still doesn't show up, then at least we can play trains again. :)

Finally, I'd like to report that Shad and I got to hit the town for NYE this year. It's been a LONG time since we did anything but stay home for the occassion. The kids were invited to a "slumber party" at Shad's parents' house and so we were in good shape to pursue a night on the town. We went out with Hans and Tara and ate in Effingham at the Firefly Grille. The food was absolutely fabulous. The service was crappy. For the $ it was a little disappointing to be treated rudely by waitstaff, but the food did make up for it. (Yes, it's that good. Go try it.) We then trotted in to Jeleniz and drank a few (ok, more than a few) and rang in the New Year. Here's proof that we got out of the house for once:

Nevermind the drunken, squinty eyes that we both had by the time I whipped out the camera and made Hans take our picture. Also, a big thanks to Tara for driving us and putting up with a little bit of extra crazy.

Happy 2008!!