And one day, she had a tooth

Some weeks, it seems like so much happens in my little girl’s life. In a matter of days, and sometimes just hours, she’s sitting up like she’s been doing it forever. She suddenly discovers the joy that is playing peekaboo. Maybe she’s actually jumping in her jumper instead of just hanging, or she’s big enough to take a bath with her big brother. Or she gets her very first tooth.
When I started writing this post at the beginning of last week, it was called, “Toothless.” I wrote about how much I loved her gummy little smile, but how it made me wonder—when do babies start popping teeth again? I wrote that my memory is hazy, but I thought the other three all got their first teeth around the 7 or 8-month mark. I went on to say that I guessed this was another example of how this girl does things on her own sweet time. Oh, and I jumped online to double-check when, exactly, first teeth can be expected. For the record, it’s between 4 (really?) and 7 months for the vast majority. Huh, I thought, so any time now.
And then she popped her first tooth. It’s on the bottom, the left tooth in the middle. It’s adorable.
I can’t remember what we were doing, but she found my thumb and pulled it to her mouth, as she sometimes does, and started gnawing away as usual. But this time, I felt the sharp edge of a freshly popped tooth, and when everyone raced over to see, our girl grinned and laughed at us and let everyone gently poke a finger in to trace her teensy new tooth.
She hasn’t been particularly drooly, but she did wake up with a runny nose last weekend. And she got a little rash around her mouth. In retrospect—duh. But at the time, I chalked it up to our supremely dry high-desert climate and blamed her siblings for the runny nose. She was pretty cheerful for the most part, so teething didn’t really occur to me. Actually, we thought she was teething hard a few weeks ago; she was super crabby and gnawing on everything and nothing came of it.
We’ve been peeking in her mouth regularly for the last few months, keeping an eye out for those swollen little bulges that seem to preface the actual tooth. Now it’s here, and it’s so cool, even if it’s less a tooth right now and more like a tooth-hole with a sharp bit. She’s already putting it to use, digging that little pointy edge into her spoon when she eats … or into my thumb. She hasn’t bitten me when she’s nursing yet, but the potential is very real. I remember two of the other three all having a go at me (and I’m sure the other one did too, I just blocked it out), so it’s going to happen at some point. I’m not really jazzed about it, but what can you do? That’s the type of scenario you handle after it happens.
When we brush everyone’s teeth in the morning and at bedtime, we’ve been giving her a little baby toothbrush to hold. She waves it around and sucks on it and drops it, and now, we also use it to ceremoniously swipe at her big girl tooth. She’s so proud.