All I Want For Christmas...

Sometimes, I get to be right. Not always, (as my children would have you believe) but sometimes. Usually when I am right, I do the dance of joy, in your face, I was RIGHT and you were WRONG. Not this time. This time, being right sucks.

We are in the middle of a winter event the likes I have not seen in Portland. Not in almost 20 years of living here do I remember weather this awful. The east wind is howling, snow fell and iced over, and the thermometer says 20 something all day long. We are about to get hit with another 2 or 4 or 6 inches of the white stuff...and the dread continues. Of course, Portlanders can't drive for s**t in the snow, so they cancel school. Yesterday was the stuff of kids' dreams, a SNOW DAY. Carter's friend Chris called and invited him over "to play". I said okay and took a bundled up Carter (and Callie, who had made plans with her girls in the same general area) to Chris's house for a couple of hours.

Carter of course wanted to go sledding, but I explained to him that there was no snow, just ice, and that ice is dangerous-dangerous-dangerous. Most of you can probably finish the blog in your head now. Yes, Carter and his friends went sledding. In a place that he should not have been, doing something he was told not to do. I got a panicked phone call..."mom, I knocked my tooth out." Most of the blood in my head went to my feet. Which tooth? A front one, of course. Did he have it? No, it was lost in the snow. By now my freak-out was full force. All right, call reinforcements. Leave work, pick him up. Assess damage. Freak out.

I found him walking back from the park with his pals, the dredded sled dragging along behind them. My first look at this tooth was as awful as you can imagine. My baby boy, lip cut open and bloody, missing one of his beautiful front teeth. "I'm sorry mom," he sobs.

He feels horrible, and his mouth hurts, too. I gather myself together. He is mostly whole, it could have been so much worse. I try to be grateful. I try to be calm.

The neighbor is a doctor and he thinks Carter will be okay after a trip to the dentist. We are at the dentist at 6:30am the next morning. The nerve is okay, the part of the tooth that is still intact can maybe be capped, but not until the trauma to the mouth heals - in a couple of weeks. I calculate the cost in my head, root canal, crown, implant...but for the next 3 weeks Carter has a hole in his mouth you can drive a truck through.

There is a lesson here, but it's not the lesson I thought it would be. Carter said he knew he shouldn't have gone down the hill on the sled. He'd watched Danny do it, and even though the 'little voice" inside him told him not to, he went ahead. We had a long talk...about peer pressure and when to say no. The tooth is gone forever, a lesson is learned, and it could have been so much worse. Last night I was freaked out. Tonight I feel lucky.