Gray Tooth

Sorry for the lapse in posting; I've been on deadline at work, so all my creative juices have been sucked up into writing that matters. But, no fear - here I am, equipped with grammatical skill and literary talent. Ok, not so much. Here goes, anyway...

Miss Sydney and I were having some Mommy & Me time tonight, and while we were wrestling on the carpet, I tricked her with one of my best Steve Austin moves (He's a wrestler, right?). Admittedly, Syd's a dog, and not always the smartest of dogs at that, but still I was impressed with myself. When I was laying on my back, I tucked my knees to my chest and pulled her on to the bottom of my feet, and then shot her straight up into the air. She freaked and her spaghetti legs went in four different directions. Fair to say I won that round. But the real gem behind the one-on-one was that it brought back a funny memory of me & my sister Lindsey.

When she was a toddler, I pulled the same move with her (only under the guise of playing, not wrestling). We were on the couch with my mother, and I pulled her up on my feet, holding her hands, to play "airplane." She was laughing and having fun until...

My mom, jokingly (I think) smacked my leg because it was dipping into her line of vision as she sat beside us reading a book. It startled me more than anything, but it was enough to knock Lindsey off course and she came flying down. Her front teeth gnashed right into my knee cap; it was a bloody mess. She started wailing, and my mom brought her into the kitchen where she put a towel under cold water and soothed her mouth. It took awhile for it to stop bleeding, but eventually it did, and after an ice pop bribe, she calmed down. (My knee was pretty sore, but no one really cared about that. Hummph.)

The next day though, when Linds woke up, her front tooth was a dark gray, almost black. Turns out, the blood had actually dripped into the tooth cavity, and dried. It wasn't harmful to the tooth at all, and the dentist said that she was too young for them to pull it. Eventually it would fall out like any other baby tooth and her brand new adult tooth would be whiter than my Caucasian behind. But, that would be years away - and so, even though the gray lightened up over time - by the time she got to Preschool, she looked like a Hillbilly baby, with one gray front tooth. Of course I felt badly about the whole thing, but it was an accident, after all, so I might as well enjoy the humor in it, right? The tooth did indeed fall out as it was supposed to, the Toothfairy came and she got the same dollar under her pillow that she would have gotten from a white tooth. No harm, no foul, I say.