First Trip to the Dentist

If we were really good parents, we probably would have taken Aletheia to the dentist around her first birthday, just to make sure that everything was going well with her incoming teeth.

We're not that good.

I was feeding Aletheia lunch last Friday when she jerked in her chair and screamed, clearly in pain. So leaned in and opened up her mouth and saw this:



I'm not a dentist, but to my untrained eye, that looked bad. Really bad. Here's the close-up so you can get a better look at the badness in her mouth.



I thought she had maybe broken a tooth, because she took a bad spill in the church nursery recently and split her lip. So I called every single dentist in our town right then, and--get this--not a single one was working that day. None of them. It must have been the Greater Southwest Dental Conference or something. I briefly flirted with the idea of taking her to a dental clinic across the border--and there are some really good ones there--but decided instead to take her to a pediatrician just to get a professional opinion.

Dr. Herndon isn't a dentist either, but he thought it looked bad. Really bad. Using his magical doctor networking skills, he managed to get a call through to a pediatric dentist, who agreed to see Allie on Monday.

Long story short--the tooth is fine, but somehow her gums got really infected--probably as a result of some damage to the gumline in last week's fall. So, antibiotics and wait for it to clear up. Good news over all.

Then yesterday was the aforementioned 15-month check-up, and our regular pediatrician took a look and said she had never seen that happen before. So, altogether our kid has above-average height, a freakishly big head, and a bizarrely rare infant gum infection. I'm sure she deserves some kind of ribbon, but I'm not sure what color it should be.

15 Months, 9 Days