Look at the inside of that mouth...good grief, could you possibly cram any more metal in there? My oldest came home yesterday afternoon from "step 1" of what will be a two to three year ordeal with appliances and braces. He has a fairly severe overbite and apparently if we don't get it taken care of now, he'll have to have his jaw broken and reset when he gets older to correct the problem. He also lost a large portion of both of his front teeth in a playground accident when he was in 3rd grade. He was being chased by some girl, and as he looked back to see if she was gaining on him, he turned and ran right into a pole. Figures. Dropped him cold for a second and put a huge gash on his forehead as well as knocking out his front teeth. When I arrived at the school, there was blood everywhere and he was freaked about the teeth (permanent of course). Poor kid ended up having to have an MRI and everything.
If his overbite hadn't been so bad, he might not have lost his teeth. But, as it is, we're talking years and years of forking over the dough to fix #1's smile. We had his front teeth temporarily filled in, but he won't be able to get them capped until he's around 17 or so because, unbeknown to me, the roots of your teeth are not fully grown until that age.
So, we've started the "appliance" portion of the money sucking endeavor first. Let's just hope we have a few pennies left over for college by the time we're finished with his teeth.
I honestly have no idea how orthodontists expect kids to eat in that contraption. He was so frustrated last night just trying to get down a couple of fries, and a hamburger was totally out of the question. He couldn't get the food past all the metal to swallow it. I finally took pity on him and ran out to the grocery store and bought a whole pantry full of soup, pudding, yogurt, ice cream, etc. But, he can't eat soft and mushies for a whole year! Dr. O says it just takes a little time to adjust, and I repeated that to the son a couple dozen times last night, but he's not buying it...lol.
Sigh...#1 son is as impatient as I am at times. He does seem to be adjusting a bit better today as I haven't heard quite as much complaining, but I don't think he's attempted to eat much of anything.
I'm just thankful we waited until summer to start this whole process so he didn't have to deal with getting used to them during the school year.
