Our normal routine in the evenings is to go to the pool as soon as the kids get up from their naps in the afternoon (where Brett meets us when he gets home from work), then we walk home, change into pajamas, eat dinner, brush teeth, read books, go to bed. Yesterday was going the same as always, except when Brett got to the pool I headed out to make dinner for everyone and get ready to leave for dinner with some friends.
Right as I was finishing up cooking dinner and was grabbing my keys to leave for my dinner out with friends, I heard Brett and the kids coming in the front door. Brett looked distraught.
Brett - Aaron chipped his tooth at the pool.
Me - WHAT? Why didn't you call me? What do we do? I need to call Debbi (my friend that I was going to meet is also mother of 3 children who are older, so I figured she would have advice).
Debbi didn't have a specific dentist to call, so I got off the phone with her and went into mommy mode. While the kids watched TV (Aaron wasn't actually crying at all, but his mouth was bleeding), Brett and I were on the phone calling the pediatrician, dentists, and anyone else we thought could help. What ended up being the biggest help was a post I put up Facebook asking if anyone knew an emergency pediatric dentist.
An old friend of ours who is a dental hygienist called me right away and was able to calm us down a little (apparently chipped baby teeth were no biggie), but she also gave us the number of a friend who was a pediatric dentist. Once we called him, Aaron let me get into his mouth a little more to see what was going on. Turns out his "chip" was more like a split up the center of his tooth (the whole center was shattered away) and the dentist advised us that he would either need it pulled or need a root canal. Bad news (as if the whole tooth thing wasn't bad news) - this doctor was out of town and most of the people he would recommend were also out of town. However, he knew one dentist - Dr. Ternisky out of McLean. Another friend on Facebook had JUST recommended the same dentist, so we gave her a call.
Dr. Ternisky was EXACTLY what we needed. She explained over the phone that it wasn't going to be a fun process. Aaron would need to essentially be strapped down to the table, and we would need to hold his head while she gave him shots in his gums and then she would pull the tooth.
Knowing that we didn't want Peter to have to listen to all of crying and yelling and knowing that we wanted to both be with Aaron, we started calling around to friends who could potentially watch Peter for a couple hours. Thankfully our friend's Christy and Dave were more than willing and we were able to quickly drop off Peter and head to the dentist.
Once we got to the dentist, everything went exactly as she had explained, except she didn't really say that it would be the most torturous moment that anyone of us had ever endured. Poor kid needed about 10 little Novocain shots in his gums and into the middle of the tooth, and pulling the tooth was not at all like what I remember from having loose teeth yanked as a kid. The dentist had to get the root, so lets just say, it didn't come out too easily.
With that said - Dr. Terniski was wonderful and Aaron was such a little trooper. Through the tears he made jokes, got excited about the tooth fairy and gave us some smiles (photo post pull):
The dentist recommended that we take him out to ice cream after we picked up Peter, much to both kid's excitement.
When we got home, we put Aaron's tooth under his pillow (something I never thought I would be doing while one of my kids was still sleeping in a crib). This morning he was so excited to find a dollar and looks forward to going to the Dollar Tree later this morning.
Side note - the photo of Aaron at the pool (at the top of this post) was the last photo ever taken of his baby tooth. The dentist said his new tooth would grow back in 2-4 years, so we have a long time before we have another photo with a full set of teeth in Aaron's mouth.
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