Logan's Teeth Saga

A little over a month ago, I had the worst night of sleep since Lexi was just born and up every 2-3 hours. In fact, this may have even been worse. See, Logan tends to crawl into our bed just about every night. Sometimes we make him go back to his bed, but we usually just let him stay, because we're too lazy to get out of bed ourselves. This particular night, however, the kid would not stop moving around. So, we'd take him to his room, and then an hour later, he'd be back in our bed, wiggling around. He finally settled down early in the morning, at which time Lexi decided to wake up. Not a fun night for Jon and I.

One of the times Logan crawled into bed with us, he said that his cheek hurt. Whatever, right? Lo and behold, in the morning (after I was already up with Lexi and Jon had already left for work) Logan comes down complaining about his cheek again - and he has proof. His left cheek was all swollen. So, I'm getting ready to call the doctor, when my Mom (who was still here, thank goodness) told me to call the Dentist instead. So, off we go to our family dentist Dr. Walker. (note: this was now Logan's 5th trip to the dentist an account of the root canal he had and the 8 cavities he already had filled. Needless to say, he his not fond of going Dr. Walker's office). One look inside his mouth and the doc says he's got an abscessed tooth. It appears that a filling cracked and got infected, or something like that. Dr. Walker knows that Logan is very anxious now about getting his teeth worked on, and kids are not his specialty, so he decides to send us to a peds dentist, Dr. Rogers (Roy Rogers, actually-ha ha). After an x-ray and quick peek in Logan's mouth, it's determined by the doc and myself that Logan needs surgery. Even after all of the work done on his teeth, the doc can see even more that needs to be fixed, plus there's an excellent chance the infected tooth needs to be pulled. Rather than make Logan even more anxious about visiting the dentist, we decide putting him under and doing all of the work at one time will be the best thing.

So, five days later, we go to the hospital. He had to put on a gown, which he hated. He kept saying he wanted to put his clothes back on. But, they did give him 2 lizards to play with and he liked that. Before they took him away from us, they gave him some medicine that made him loopy, so he wouldn't have separation anxiety. It was funny to see him like that...he was obsessed with that thing on his finger. It has a red light on it that was apparently utterly fascinating. He was in surgery for about an hour and half. When we went back to see him afterward, he was still a little out of it, but he started crying a little, so I held him and rocked with him. The first words out of his mouth were "Where are my clothes?". I wonder if that's what he thought about the whole time he was under.

The result? The infected tooth was removed, his front two teeth were separated (they touched, which gives a greater chance of getting a cavity), his teethed were cleaned up and - get this - he got four crowns. I was in shock. Four crowns!?! On my 4-year-old, who just had 8 fillings, who had to cut way back on juice, soda and all other forms of sugar, who was finally doing so good at brushing his teeth not once, but twice a day?!?! So now he's got a bunch of silver 'bling' in his mouth.

Logan did great during the recovery. So great, that it was hard to get him to lay down and rest the rest of the day. He kept wanting to go out and play and eat everything in sight. It was hard to find soft foods for him to eat. He's not a big fan of soup, and there's only so much yogurt, pudding and ice cream you can give a kid in one day. The good news is that he says he likes Dr. Rogers better than Dr. Walker, and that next time he goes to the dentist, he wants to go to Dr. Rogers.

One month later, we still battle all of the time about juice and sugar and brushing teeth. In fact, the other day, after the 3rd or 4th time I asked him to brushed his teeth, he says something to me about don't I remember that he likes Dr. Rogers and wants to go see him? Sure, I say. "Well, then, that means I don't need to brush my teeth." (Because he needs to have bad teeth to go to the dentist, or something?) I'm not really sure what his exact reasoning on that it, but any excuse to get out of brushing teeth, right?