She's Full of Surprises!

This Li'l Empress of ours is often quite a mystery to me. For as long as we've known her, she's struggled with a bit of "white coat" syndrome - fearful in varying degrees of doctors and nurses and others in medical garb, no matter how cute or trendy those scrubs may look. So when our dentist suggested we see the local pediatric dentist to remove some baby teeth that were no.where.close. to loose enough to fall out on their own, The Boss and I geared ourselves up for a potentially tough experience.

I took her for the consult appointment and the nurse gave her the full tour of all the equipment they'd be using, calling the nitrous oxide their "happy air" and the numbing gel "sleepy juice" for her gums. They wisely left out all conversation about injections, needles, blood, and so on, after reading her chart and the notes I gave upon the initial conversation to set up the consult. They gave her a ride in the "space rocket chair" and let her pick prizes just for being a good listener. I was excited to hear her telling her brother about it later, in really positive tones. Based upon previous experiences, we prepped the kids to keep it a positive conversation and to steer away from all talk of needles or blood. We had some near misses with that one, but they were a bunch of troupers, helping make it sound like way more fun than any extraction appointment should sound like!

Here she is, the morning of the "wiggling out." She was pretty nervous but as long as I answered her MILLIONS of questions patiently and similarly to the last time she asked them, 30 seconds ago, we stayed fairly positive together.

See the second row of teeth down there?

No, she's not part shark.

Apparently, her teeth are as unhappy

about change as she usually is!

This is her picture to show Daddy at work that she was doing "great so far" and that she brought her little cow from their date night with her for comfort.

She wanted this picture of the "happy air" so that she could show her brothers the funny mask she had to wear. "It looks like a piggie nose, Mommy!" was her comment when I showed her the photo.

This is her, after all the tugging and twisting and "wiggling" was done. I had to stop watching at one point, as I was getting light-headed at the scene in front of me. I am definitely not dental assistant material! Note her somber face here. She was "thiiiiiiis close" to losing it just before I took it, when she finally understood that the gauze was necessary to stop the bleeding. They did have to finally explain that part to her. She totally got that "deer in the headlights" look and I tried to distract her by saying, "Hey, let's send Daddy a 'thumbs up' picture so he knows his prayers worked!" Heh.

I don't know that she was all that fooled but she let me distract her for a few minutes anyway. This child does not do well with blood at.all and gave in to a few tears and tried to tell me through the gauze once we were home that she really wanted to be all done with "this tooth stuff."

But she handled it and totally pushed the tears aside. For the rest of the day! I couldn't believe it. There were a couple moments when I told her if she needed to cry or be sad it was okay with me. But she surprised me by shaking her head quite adamantly and pointing instead to the t.v. for distraction. For the rest of the day, we pampered her with soft, cold foods, acetaminophen, and lots of entertaining kids' shows. And we kept commenting over and over about how brave she had been.

Privately, we kept commenting to each other all the way up till bed-time that we were so unprepared for how well she'd handle this whole day. Honestly, we've had much less "difficult" appointments with her, things we thought were going to be simple, straight-forward, even easy-peasy. And they've turned into traumatic, surprising, cringe-worthy experiences that NONE of us would ever want to repeat. She surprised us "happy" this time, for sure!!!

Here she is, little gap-toothed cheesy grin.
And a little loopy-looking from just waking up from a nap!

No more shark smiles!

This is just another one of those times that surprised us.

This time for the GOOD.