Things went relatively well at the dentist’s yesterday. By which, I mean that between the cardiology consult, the referring x-rays, the insurance, the sedation, and a hungry, hurting two-year-old, it only took us three and a half hours to have a twenty minute procedure done. Max is now wearing a temporary stainless steel cap (crown?) on his tooth-stump. Heaven help me, I feel like a verybad mother. Greg says he looks like a pimp. Greg is not helping.
Max is… a very special boy. He is sweet, he is loving, and he is very, very bright. Some of you may remember me talking about his developmental problems at the beginning of this year. By now, I think I can say with confidence that his only limitations are physical ones. His speech is delayed, not because he can’t understand or learn the words, but because his mouth cannot easily form the correct sounds. His motor skills were delayed because his muscles didn’t have the strength for him to progress normally. Since the day he was born, so quietly – when we found out that he had a hole in his heart – occasionally it strikes me what a frail vessel his body is to carry my precious baby.
This was one of those occasions. Max has weak teeth. Not just in terms of enamel, and cavities – which he has (the dentist told me weak teeth are often associated with his type of heart defect) – but apparently structurally as well. It’s just one more way that his body failed him, one more thing to worry about. For a long time I blamed myself for his cavities, thought that I wasn’t brushing enough, or feeding him too many snacks. It was only recently that I realized I couldn’t shoulder all of the responsibility for them – weak teeth, plus his tendency not to swallow consistently (leaving puddles of saliva or food just sitting in there on his teeth while he plays) are stacking the deck against him. I’m still feeling the relief that comes when you realize that it cannot possibly be all your fault.
I know that this is not the usual content for this blog, and I half-apologize for that. I like to keep this more of a crafty space than otherwise, but it’s been a peculiar day. I feel like I’ve been in a coma, and when I woke up I couldn’t quite understand where I was or how I had gotten here. Today was the first normal day in forever – Greg went to work, I stayed home and played with the kids, we went shopping. It was normal, but Max has a silver tooth, and we’re in a different house, and everything is still in boxes. It reminded me of the visit I made to my family earlier this year, when (I believe the number was) 94 tornadoes touched down in the state one night. One actually came close enough to our house that we heard the train-noise that is so often described. Everyone ran to the ‘safety spot,’ where we stood in a huddle as the windows rattled and the storm passed us in the dark. In the morning, the world was strangely different. The temperature had dropped 30 degrees from the previous day, the shed had tipped over, trees were dotted with pink tufts of insulation like so many flowers. Some lawn furniture had flown a hundred yards away, other pieces were still grouped together but had moved only fifteen feet. Everywhere you turned, something was almost right, right next to something very wrong. Today was only the calm within the storm for me, though – tomorrow Greg has (elective, long-scheduled, orthodontic) surgery at oh-early-thirty and will be home convalescing for two weeks. And his mother is coming next week for Thanksgiving.

In other news, we have ants. While my first thought was, ‘Oh, not again!’ my second was of poison. Lots, and lots, and lots of poison. Greg says that in any new construction you must expect a certain amount of buggy curiousity, but we will see if curiosity or the poison is what kills the ants.

Tomorrow we return to your regularly-scheduled craftiness. Maybe.