All I Want For Christmas Is

On Wednesday afternoon when I picked up the kids from school they asked if we could have Chick-fil-A for dinner. I was okay with this since Chet was out of town and I hate cooking for just myself. We headed to Chick-fil-a and then to Target. When we left Target and were back in the car Harris wanted to finish his Sprite so he reached across the back seat to the cup holder and got a hold of it by the lid and of course the Sprite spilled all over his lap. So I of course told him that he was going to have to shower when we got home.

When we got home he got into the shower and proceeded to do what 6 year old boys do in the shower, karate. All seemed to be going well when all of a sudden I heard a loud thud followed by a blood curdling scream followed by frantic calls for MOM!!! I ran in there and was confronted by Harris standing outside of the shower covered in blood. I freaked out and yelled (frantically not mean) "what happened?!" As he tried to tell me what happened he spit blood and teeth into my hands!  Crap! is what I was thinking at this point. I got him back into the shower to get him rinsed off and to evaluate the damage. It was bad. I got him out and immediately called the dentist. It was already 5 o'clock but he agreed to stay until we got there. Usually it takes about 15 minutes to get there but of course there was a car accident and it took us almost 30 to get there!

I took this while we were sitting in traffic on the way to the dentist. You can see the three holes on the outside of his lower lip and his missing teeth. And if you look closely you can kinda tell that the top left tooth doesn't look quite right.

When we finally got to the dentist and got into an exam room most of the bleeding had stopped but he was in A LOT of pain. When the dentist began the exam Harris actually asked him to numb it! The dentist looked at me and I said "if he's asking you to then go ahead." It took 2 whole vials to get him numb enough for the dentist to get a good look!

The first thing he took care of were the 3 holes he bit into the outside of his lower lip. He cleaned them really thoroughly with special antiseptic for teeth bites and then had to use a coagualnt to stop the bleeding before he could close them up. He decided against a stitch in each one and used surgical glue to seal them shut and minimize scarring. After the outside of his mouth was taken care of  he moved to the inside of his mouth. It was ugly. His gums on the top and bottom around his 4 front teeth as well as his lower lip were dark purple and looked like hamburger. His bottom gums and lip were so torn up he had to debride the torn up tissue from them. When he was finished with that they gave his mouth a good rinse before taking a look at his teeth. As he was looking at his teeth I commented that it looked like he had chipped one of the teeth on the top next to his fron tooth. He took a look at it and said it's not chipped but I want to get some x-rays of it. When he was examining the x-rays he said everything looked fine except that one tooth which was inverted! As in he hit it so hard it went back up into his gums!!! He said it wasn't a huge deal because it was a baby tooth and it would either fall out or come back down. So far it has come back down most of the way and gotten loose so we will see what happens...

When we were done at the dentist Harris asked if we could stop and get a smoothie. I obliged and got him one. We quickly discovered that he was too numb to drink it though. It kept dribbling out of his mouth! He gave up and decided that he wanted to call Gram Wendy and Auntie Lindsay. (One thing I forgot to mention is that the next day was school picture day...) As he was talking to Gram Wendy they were talking about school pictures the next day and said "It's school pictures tomorrow. But don't worry Grandma, it will be a good memory." And then while he was talking to Auntie Lindsay she told him "to smile real big for pictures so he can always remember he knocked his teeth out the day before. Harris said in reply, "Looking at those pictures later will still be really painful for me." Haha! He's so cute!

I took these the next morning, it actually looked a million times better. I was so glad.

It was quite swollen though!

Although it was a very traumatic experience Harris was really brave and handled it very well. I'm glad that he's all better now!