So, “Permanent” Teeth You Say…?

August 3, 2009

Behind on posting…again…so this is news that is now over a week old.

Julie headed to Cleveland for the day two weekends ago with Alana to attend her cousin’s baby shower. That left me with the boys for the day.

And, was I ever on a Super Dad roll! To summarize:

• Built a plaster-of-Paris volcano from a kit I’d ordered when it was on sale a year ago
• Headed to the Columbus Zoo for a bit to check out the North America area (which I never manage to hit)
• Lunch back at home
• Movie at the dollar (-fifty) theater
• Driving range
• Dinner back at home — attracting two of the neighborhood kids to join us because there were my ever-popular homemade tortillas (I’ll post the recipe I use one of these days)
• Benton, Carson, and the neighbor kids then headed out to the woods behind our house to continue work on the stick/branch “fort” they’ve been building over the past few weeks

It was shortly past 7:00 in the evening, and there had not been a single request for computer time!

I patted myself on the back, thought for a minute, then gave myself another pat for my Good Parenting Move, in that I had told Carson that, no, they could not take a hammer and nails from my workshop back into the woods for the fort. That seemed neither safe nor environmentally friendly. But, mostly, it didn’t seem safe.

<foreshadowing>A shovel, on the other hand, seemed harmless enough. It was a just a short little sharpshooter, after all! </foreshadowing>

They’d been gone probably 15 minutes when the following sequence of text messages went back and forth between Julie and me:

Julie to Me 7:20:28 PM Headed out @7 after dinner with Brett and Tami. FYI

Me to Julie 7:42:58 PM Volcano construction, $1.50 movie, driving range, tortillas/quasadillas (w/ M_ & E_). They’re all out on the farm now. Drive safe.

And, not quite ten minutes later…

Me to Julie 7:52:49 PM And Carson looks to have a couple chipped lower incisors courtesy of a shovel and M_ (unintentionally)

Needless to say, my phone rang pretty quickly.

A slightly fuzzy visual of the damage:

Apparently, a sharpshooter shovel isn’t much of a scythe, and it’s ill-advised to use it when a semi-oblivous 8-year-old is wandering around behind you. Totally accidental, and not the result of any rampantly irresponsible behavior.

Three chipped permanent teeth. One of them worse than the picture shows, as the back of the tooth sort of sheered off. They all got repaired the following Monday by my friend, who runs a dental clinic in Cincinatti OH, but it’s iffy if the one tooth will survive. Time will tell!

Posted in Carson