About that tooth brushing pic...

Yeeeaahhh...

Welllll...

Ummm...

See, she kinda doesn't brush her own teeth.

The thing about pics is that they capture a moment in time.

And if you have a quick camera, it really can be just a fraction of a second.

Which isn't real life.

AT ALL.

Playette loves the idea of brushing teeth.

She'll go "dih dih dih?"* and sign brush teeth when BD brings her into our room in the morning, just after she's had her breakfast.

She even goes up on her tippiest of toes, opens and reaches into the top drawer of our bathroom sink space to take out her small tube of toothpaste and her toothbrush in the clear, ridged plastic holding tube.

And that's when all forward momentum stops.

Unless we decide to equate sucking the toothpaste off of the brush to actually and truly brushing teeth.

If we were to do that, she would be thrilled.

But we don't so she is Not. Ever. Thrilled.

*sigh*

Hey, she has teeth. I'm happy for that. Not all, but some, and more than before, so YAY.

The brushing thing though? Ick. It's just hard. She fights us and then we end up having to create these contortionistic moves that include heads in laps or legs on tub edges or arms pinned down on white bedsheets that used to be clean, but then somehow become stained with blue gel that leaves a hit of bubble gum smell behind.

I mean, if you look at that last post again, you'll see that the picture prior to the one in question has me demonstrating what needs to be done and her pushing my hand away. Nicely. *snort*

And don't get me started on my work clothes. I came to work yesterday looking like I grabbed my shirt from the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. I swear it was kinda clean when I put it on.

Plus, her hair? The hair I work so hard on (almost) every morning? Well, after she thrashes around yelling, "Nooo!" and "Ah done!"? It's rather messy. To say the least.

So maybe we should change the order of our routine. Or wait her out and hope one day that she realizes the benefits of good oral hygiene on her own.

Oh, I don't know.

Totally winging it here.

But I wanted to keep it honest.



* "Dih dih dih?" seems to be her universal, go-to question these days. There's inflection and the signs help her to communicate what it is that she wants/needs, but she doesn't have the words, so "dih dih dih?" it is for now.