Wednesday, July 13, 2011

A Tale of Two Teeth

LO now has a grand total of 4 and 2 halves teeth. (That sort of equals 5, but since the two halves are oneither side his two front teeth, I don't think that they together equal a whole.)

Unfortunately, his teeth are not following the straight and narrow maternal path. The two front teeth are both somewhat crooked and really rather far apart. We will get a chance to hit the reset button on his teeth, and we can hope that he will at that point remember that he is the son of a woman who needed no orthodontic work whatsoever. (I was actually jealous that everyone I knew got to have braces and I was stuck with stinky old straight teeth. If you look up the word ungrateful, there's a picture of me at 13.)

LO has no issues with the fact that his teeth are crooked. He still smiles as readily as ever, and I'm reminded of when my very proper, always well-groomed Jewish grandmother lost a tooth when she was in her 80s. It was about a week before her dentist could fix it. So you would go out to a restaurant and see a wealthy Jewish woman out to eat with her granddaughters. She made sure she had coordinated her purse and shoes, had her extra-strength girdle firmly in place, her hair set perfectly, but her de-toothed smile would suddenly make the banjo music start up.

LO's smile has looked the same (toothless) for so long, that I am surprised every time I see those two little teeth far enough apart that they look like they are refusing to speak to each other. (Who knows what happened between them while they were still in the gum?)

I do think that he is showing a remarkable resemblance to a certain cartoon sponge, his lack of squarepants notwithstanding. You'll notice they both have the same sunny blue eyes with incredibly long lashes. They both have the same gap-toothed smile. They both are absorbent and yellow and porous. Okay, maybe it breaks down there.



There is one other individual that LO resembles:


(Unfortunately, I keep referring to this gentleman as Edward R. Murrow, which makes sense only in my head. It's the middle initial thing.)


I just hope that LO will have the wonderful imagination and sense of satire that his gap-toothed forebears have made famous. And that he'll invite me to visit in his pineapple under the sea.

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