Dr. Teeth

The boys had their first dentist visit today. (I was a little surprised that the waiting room was filled with other kids not too much older than they were!) It all went very well.

The first part of the visit was going over the boys' history. One question on the information form was, "Were there any problems during the pregnancy or the first year? If so, explain." And then they only gave one line for a response. I had to laugh at that one. ("Here is a way in which we are different from normal people.") It was underneath the section where you check off various conditions in the medical history, so for James, I just put "Extensive; see above."

They did not seem too fazed by that, though, and in fact the staff seemed quite knowledgable about preemie issues. Both boys have some little mottling on their front teeth which is probably a preemie developmental thing (basically, that there was some interruption when those teeth were developing, where the body needed to focus on more important things). That shouldn't affect their permanent teeth, and the good thing about it being on the front teeth is that those are the ones that are easiest to brush and keep an eye on (although they don't expect any problems.) For James, they mentioned that there were some cosmetic things they could do if needed, but they didn't recommend it unless it became a problem (translation: unless kids at school were teasing him.) My guess is that it won't be noticable enough to be an issue.

All the staff there were really nice, and obviously experts at dealing with little kids. They started out the visit (after talking to me without the boys) with letting the boys each pick out what color balloon they wanted, and then the hygenist had a stuffed alligator and she demonstrated looking at his teeth before she looked at Matthew's. (Mike had James with a different hygenist.) She looked at his teeth and then brushed them. He was unhappy with it at first, but then I told him it was just like in his Sleepy Baby book (the Sleepy Baby brushes his teeth, and Mattie usually does the sign for toothbrushing at that point -- the sign is rubbing your finger along your teeth, so he gets the idea), and then we sang him the alphabet song while she was doing it, and he calmed down. Jamesie was less cooperative, so he only got the looking and not the brushing. The dentist gave them both a flouride treatment. And they got to pick a little toy out of the toy box.

Both of them are getting some more molars in. As we knew, James's teeth are coming in more slowly than Mattie's did, but they're all in the right sequence, so there's no problem with that.

The dentists didn't make us feel bad about our failure to regularly (translation: ever) brush the boys' teeth, but they gave us good encouragement about how to make it part of the routine. They also didn't seem concerned that the boys were still drinking bottles rather than sippy cups, so maybe I'll continue to not push that transition for a while. (The problem is that we probably have to go cold turkey with Mattie since he's still rejecting milk served in a cup, but we don't want to do anything with James that will reduce his calorie intake. I just can't see it going over well if James is allowed bottles and Mattie isn't.)

The balloons were a big hit for the rest of the afternoon. :)