Confident Smile!

Big excitement at our house yesterday! My older daughter went to the dentist and got her smile fixed! Actually, it was just one tooth, but having that one tooth fixed has given her back her beautiful and most importantly - confident - smile!

When my girl was a toddler, she had an accident where she was running to get something (toy Elmo figure, I believe) and she tripped and fell mouth first into a glass-topped coffee table. Her two top front baby teeth went through her bottom lip and there were lots of tears and lots of blood! We all went to the ER and she got a couple of stitches (terribly traumatic for my husband and I -- she doesn't remember, fortunately!) in her lip. We then took her to the dentist and while her teeth felt a tiny bit loose, he did not think she would lose them prematurely (which was correct).

Well, years go by, she has a scar under her bottom lip (which she loves to tell the kids at school about, by the way), but everything else is fine. Until her two top front adult teeth come in and one of them looks like it has a yellow-y/brown popcorn kernel stuck to the front of it! Well, it never seemed to bother my girl -- she never mentioned being upset about it. When we took her for her last dental appointment, I spoke to the dentist about it, and he said that more than likely it was caused by the accident -- that the baby tooth had probably "died" and an infection was in the gum, and when the new tooth came out, this was the result. The best thing that he said, was that he could easily paint a permanent sealant over it in 6 months and it would make that tooth look like her other teeth.

When we mentioned this to her, she was so happy and excited -- come to find out, while she never mentioned this to us, a child in her class told her that her tooth was "ugly" and other kids had mentioned it and questioned her about it from time to time. And just in the past week, I heard another child ask her if she had forgotten to brush her teeth and asked what was on her tooth. I think for the most part the kids were just asking innocent questions (possible exception, the ugly comment...) and although my girl did not mention these things to us, they obviously bothered her. To be honest, through this I learned that I will need to be a bit more of a detective and look a little harder for clues, because one thing I hadn't really noticed was how often she has kept her lips together when her picture has been taken.

Well, no more of that! We were fortunate enough to be able to have her tooth fixed yesterday and she has barely stopped smiling since! While shopping last night, she kept running up and smiling into mirrors, and this morning, she bounded out of bed and told me, "Mommy! I didn't get to see my tooth at ALL while I was sleeping!!" I'm thrilled that my girl has her confident smile back, and I'm happy that she is looking forward to showing her new smile off at school in September!