The fourth first

I kept Captain Adventure home from school Tuesday because he was acting sick. Sort of. No fever, but a runny nose; no cough but he kept pointing to his entire head and saying, “Owies!”

And he wouldn’t eat breakfast. My boy doesn’t ever not eat breakfast. He may turn his nose up at lunch, snack and dinner, but when he gets up in the morning he tucks right in like a coal miner.

So I kept him home and he proceeded to be the most astonishingly annoying little twerp in the known universe. He was just in a really nasty mood for the most part, and spent most of the day in Destroyer of Worlds mode.

He took my knitting (currently a boring cotton kitchen towel, because I need them) (seriously, though, yawn!!), wrapped the towel and the circular needle cable and a fair portion of the cotton yarn around the legs of the ‘food prep’ table I’ve got set up semi-permanently in the playroom.

I could have killed him. Of course, I discovered this after a full morning of having him yelling, howling, screeching, throwing things, pulling my hair, kicking me, crying, saying, “But I wuv oo!” whenever I would say, “No! Enough! Get OFF me!”, and then proceed to hit me in the face…oh yeah. It was a great day around here.

Finally, I threw in the towel and set him up on the stupid computer. Enough. I’m done. I don’t care if your brain does turn into a gray mush and your eyeballs melt out of your head and you end up living in a home for autistic children when you’re forty. Play your stupid game and leave me OUT of it!!!

About ten minutes later, he’s standing at the top of the stairs bellowing, “Hey Mom-MEH! MOM-MEH!? Mine cheek fell down-UH!”

“Your what did which now?!” I yelled back.

“Mine cheek, it fell down-UH!” he roared back. I heaved myself out of the chair, limped to the bottom of the stairs and squinted up at him.

He was standing there grinning and holding out his hand.

“Seeeeeeeeeeee? Mine cheek, it felled down-UH! SEE, MOM-MEH!?”

There was a little dot of blood on his lip, and in his hand was a tiny shard of white.

Not cheek – teeth. His first tooth ‘fell down’ Tuesday afternoon.

…and thus did much become clear…

His whole head / throat / body didn’t hurt – just his mouth. The tooth still had a significant amount of root on one side, so I imagine it was painful as it rocked back and forth. It hurt to eat, but he was hungry as a newly-wakened bear.

Starving. But eating hurt. But starving! But eating is owies…gah! I must take this out on somebody…oh look, there’s my mother, who is about the safest person in the universe and it’s probably her fault anyway because she is supposed to be keeping my life running smoothly and does this look smooth to you, no I do not think it does…

So I made a fuss over him and his tooth, and he then ate three whole turkeys, five pounds of cheese, two loaves of bread and drank three gallons of milk, and what passes for normalcy was restored.

Whew.

That’s the fourth first lost tooth around here…but I think it was the hardest of all.

It’s what I imagine life would be like for parents everywhere, if baby teeth routinely started falling out at age two instead of around five-ish.

And it’s tiny, and white, and perfect, and somehow incredibly sweet. You’d think I’d be over such things by now, and that by the time you’re on the fourth go-round of firsts you’d be pretty blasé about them.

But it just doesn’t work that way. His first real smile was just as thrilling, his first laugh had the whole house in an uproar, his first steps were charming and of course those first words had me so excited I almost melted into a puddle of warm goo.

The fourth firsts are no less thrilling than the first firsts, at least not for me.

But I do wish they didn’t have to be so…dramatic…