I promise it won't hurt

Yeah right! Emma's two front teeth have been loose for a few weeks now. One of them has been literally hanging on for the past few days.

Before I go any farther, let me go back a few days. Last week, as will happen, the girls got into a ...how shall we say this...let's say "disagreement". It resulted in Sarah headbutting Emma in the mouth. Needless to say, Emma's mouth bled for a short time.

OK...fast forward to this week. For the past few days, Em has had a temperature and her gums have been swollen and purple. I became concerned that Sarah might have done some damage to her sister's mouth, so I made an appointment for the dentist. Most of you know that Emma is all about drama when it comes to any kind of doctors office visit. I had to convince her that all they would do was take a "picture" of her teeth and look at them . And...kudos...she might get a new toothbrush. She was cool with this, so off we trekked to the dentist.

Upon arrival, Emma developed an overwhelming need to say everything that she could possibly think of, over and over. Yep...nervous talker. After x-raying and checking all out, he motioned to me that he was going to pull one of the offending loose teeth out. Let's call it the dangler. The dentist pulled a trick on Emma (oh so sneaky) and managed to numb her mouth without her realizing it. Then he had her close eyes and snuck in the extra numbing shot. That one made her cry. She didn't know that she had received a shot, she thought that it hurt because he pulled the dangling tooth out.

Once said tooth was pulled, the dentist hugged her and put her tooth in a bag to give to Mom (me) to bring home for that mysterious night wanderer called the tooth fairy. The he did the most unheard of thing and gave her a dollar for her tooth. I want to know where he was when I was little and being forced to go to the dentist! Anyway, after reassuring us that my little headbutter had probably not done any damage to Emma's permanent teeth, we left with a wad of gauze in Emma's mouth.

I thought that this would be it, but no. On the way home, Emma leans as far forward as the seat belt would allow and bellows at me through spit and gauze: "I didn't even get a toothbrush!" My response was "you got a dollar....do you want a toothbrush instead?"

Emma says to me: "No a dollar is cooler. A toothbrush is just brush, brush, brush all day long. That's no fun!"

So there you have it. And by the way, we do know that the dollar bill is upside down in the first photo.