christmas in july

all i want for christmas is my two front teeth ...

in third grade i was playing on the monkey bars one day -- you know that one thing where you put one knee over the bar and then lean forward and spin all the way down and back up kinda like the swinging pirate ship ride at disneyland. i was about as coordinated back then as i am now ... so that day i came up a little short, i guess and hit my face on the bar. (to this day, i can't really figure out how i did that.) i broke my front tooth.

i was lucky that day, though: the school had been having construction of some sort going on and i had a crush on one of the construction guys -- tall, lanky, with curly blonde kinda-long hair (to this day, i also can't figure out how i still remember that). he was my rescuer. he came over and scooped me up then carried me to the nurse's office. it would have been so great ... but i was super embarrassed that *this* was my first interaction with (evidently) the love of my life. wow, was i a serious child!

tangent: the nurse's response when she saw my tooth: "oh, you're mom's not going to be happy about this!" who says that to a child?

anyway, i went to the dentist that day and got my tooth fixed.

fast forward some 20 years ...

i guess some dental work just doesn't last forever. by this time, my "filling" or whatever you call it had changed shape and color. the bottom edge of the filling wasn't even with my tooth. i don't think people noticed -- can you see it in this picture? (at right) --but *i* knew it was there and wasn't perfect. it was yucky.

my dentist offered to fix it. said he could even probably run it through my insurance. and so ... why not? *and* since he would be replacing the filling and matching the new filling to the color of my tooth, it was a perfect chance to whiten my teeth, too! yay!

in total, it took him about 45 minutes to grind off the old filling and put the new one on. and i am quite happy with it. i'm still pretty sure that noone even notices my teeth and the fact that they are all pretty evenly-colored and nicely shaped now. but *i* notice. so there's that ... right?

now, look at that nice set of teeth ... merry christmas!