Raising the Standard on Tooth-Removal

Nat's fam came over when Gage was maybe a week old or so to hold him. Her kiddos hadn't been allowed into the NICU, so they were really excited to hold him and kiss him. I wanted to follow through on my promise to Jake that he could be my Gage Holder:

Troy:

Gage's hands are enormous. I think he's going to be a big boy. If we could get him to chunk up.

Ivy (with Pete helping her):

I love Gage in that picture, like, "No more photographs, please."

Brock:

Gage was definitely doing his angry snorting thing at this point. Dude, he used to have so much hair. Now he is as bald as a cue-ball.

After awhile, the novelty of baby-holding wore off for the kiddos, so we sent them out back to play while Nat snuggled Gage and the adults chatted. My two-doors-down neighbor, Carolyn (a neighbor that I actually like), has a daugher who was getting rid of a basketball standard. It's plastic and pretty short - good for little kids. She asked if we wanted it, and we said, why not? So it was on our back patio. Dylan and Jake were playing with it, and Dylan wanted to adjust the standard so that it would be taller. We were all watching this go down through the back French doors.

So Dylan goes to raise the standard, and it pops out of the base and hits him right in the mouth. We see him mouth, "Ow..." (You know, because we couldn't hear anything through the doors) and put his hands to his mouth. Then we see him remove his hands from his mouth, see blood all over his hands, and scream in total terror. His mouth was large and contorted, but again, we couldn't hear him. It was actually really, really funny. It was a total American's Funniest Home Videos Moment. We would have won the $10,000 prize if we had recorded it, I'm pretty sure.

So we definitely heard him by the time he ran to the back door and opened it. He was screaming like a siren. We took him into the bathroom to check out the damage, and lo and behold, the standard had knocked out his front tooth! Here it is:

I must make a parenthetical note here. I was holding the tooth, right? That's me, in the purple shirt. See that mole on my neck? The gross, knobbly, huge one? It is no longer there. I got that one, plus three others that my dermie was nervous about, taken off on Tuesday. I'm so dang excited. I hated that neck one. Almost as badly as I hated the one in my armpit. Almost. But not quite. I now have a little scab on my neck, and one on my chest, and then two huge craters on my shoulder and my back, where he had to take out quite large chunks of tissue. They're sore. For sure. But the biopsies came back, and none of them were cancerous. Hooray!

Okay. Back to the tooth stuff. Here is Dyl:

That picture cracks me up. He's never excited to lose a tooth. It's always very traumatic for him. That was only his third tooth lost, and he's seven. He's been slow to lose teeth. He was also slow to get his baby teeth. I wonder if those two are related, the getting and the losing of baby teeth.