First floss

I'm at home trying to write (re-write, but there's a lot of new stuff) and keep A on the floor of our bedroom which means that our bedroom is now a de-facto mess. Every other sentence I stop to ask A to put things back into the bedside tables (we really need those stops installed).

One of the things he's taken out is floss, which A thinks is super: a tiny roll of waxed string that feeds out really, really fast.

Anyway, I am explaining to him what floss is and I hand him a length to play with. He tries to twist it around his fingers and then runs it through his teeth.

"Would you like me to floss you?"

Uh-huh, affirmative.

So I sit him on my lap and make an attempt at flossing a two-and-half-year-old, which I know my dental hygienist is not doing to her own two-and-half-year-old yet. A sits through it very happily, takes the string from me and attempts it again himself when I'm done, and then throws the used string in the trashcan just like Mommy does.

As a child, I had not the best dental care. We didn't floss--it was a stretch to brush twice a day. I had teeth pulled with just laughing gas, which is not enough for me. My subsequent groovy dentists both comment, "Wow, you certainly need a lot of novocaine." My childhood dentist shot himself in his ex-wife's basement before setting the house on fire--true story--and that was the end of regular dentist visits until I was a Grown-Up.

So now I verge on the crazy OCD path of dental hygiene. I brush my teeth after every meal when I'm at home. I try to floss every day and probably manage to do so most of the time. If I skip, it bugs me. If I can't remember flossing on a given day, I'll floss again to make sure that I flossed. (And I've been wearing my retainer pretty regularly.)

Well, apparently, I've set my son on a road to dental OCD. Oh well. There are worse things to pass along, I guess.

Please!

Everyone's braces-free in the C/K/A household, and there is much rejoicing. We are now accepting your donations of toffee, sugar-crusted nuts and pizza bones.

A had the speech teacher all to himself today, and he talked up a storm. He did all the animal noises with his teacher, then sang (sang!) and said, "Please!" He's signed please for the longest time, but now we're supposed to make sure he says it consistently. His teacher places a finger under her lower lip sometimes to remind A to talk, and if he's not paying enough attention to her, she'll do it to him, so that's something we're supposed to work on with him.

But she thinks he's making excellent progress, so there we are.

A and I went to the Birch Aquarium today after speech with a writer friend of mine and her two-year-old (who is huge! huge!). We all had a good time. They have these elaborate water tables with partitions you can move around to create currents and flows and float tiny boats down. A loved that. C would love it. I would have loved it more if I wasn't on baby duty and got to play with it myself.

They have tidepools (which we did not go into since A's apparently allergic to starfish protein) and fake tidepools with all sorts of rubber creatures (lobsters, starfish, crabs, shells, shrimp). Unfortunately, they're right next to each other, so A decided he would reallocate a rubber tiger shrimp to the tidepool. "Happens all the time," a docent told me, but they had to debate how best to remove it because A threw it pretty far. They needed a stick to get it.

It's a small museum but it's pretty neat. The displays are well-thought out. I think the boat thing alone is probably worth a membership.