OMG!!!

We had a bit of excitement this afternoon in the Truong household. I was sitting at the kitchen table, looking through the kids' school stuff, signing stuff, the usual afternoon routine, when Tybee stumbled between two kitchen chairs and fell.

And started crying.

The pain cry.

I picked him up, thinking he probably bumped his head. He does that pretty often, so I don't get too excited about it. But then he didn't stop crying. That's when I saw the blood.

I thought he probably just busted his lip or bit his tongue. I have two older kids, and usually when I see blood coming from their mouth, that's what has happened. So I took him into the kitchen to clean him up. I wet a paper towel, put it up to his mouth, and then he REALLY started to scream. And that's when I saw it. Or DIDN'T see it, as was the case.

His tiny little chicklet front teeth were gone! For a split second, I had the horrifying thought that they had been totally knocked out. But then I saw the two tiny white lines that were the bottom of his teeth, just barely poking through his gums in a pool of blood. His two front teeth were pushed all the way up into his gums. And there was lots and lots of blood.

My oldest son was freaking out and just kept repeating, "Uh, Mommy, that's a lot of blood. A whole lot of blood. How is he bleeding so much?" That kept up until I told him that he needed to go somewhere else while I figured out what to do.

I called our pediatric dentist, who thankfully was able to get us in within the hour. Or so I thought. We got there a few minutes early, and proceeded to wait for two hours. By this time, the kids were out of sorts, I was getting cranky, and Tybee was beyond being contained. His teeth had come back down into their normal positions, sort of. One of them looked a little crooked, but otherwise they looked fine.

They did an x-ray, and the dentist examined him. One of his teeth is loose, but the dentist expects that it will tighten back up in the next several days. Or it could get worse and need to be removed. Best case and worst case... In the meantime, he needs to eat soft foods, take it easy and not use his pacifier. Sounds like it will be a very long couple of nights for us. All I can say is thank goodness I am still nursing him. Poor little Tybee... I have a feeling that he's going to be the one that gets all the injuries. While we were in the dentist's waiting room, he kept trying to climb on and stand on the kid-sized chairs. Please keep us in your thoughts, if you don't mind. I really hope his teeth heal up quickly, and getting rid of the paci before we were ready is really not something I'm looking forward to.