Our garden is perched on a decent patch of southeastern exposure, but the remainder of our property slopes northward and releases snow with great reluctance. I hope the Easter Bunny doesn’t mind snow. Speaking of, for the quintessentially Currier & Ives feeling most holidays evoke in New England, Easter is not one of them. If you grow up here, you have childhood memories of your mother dressing you in the prettiest short sleeve cotton gingham Easter dress, lace edged bobby socks on your feet, and maybe even a new pair of Salt Water sandals, but the whole Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ensemble was then swaddled up in a wool coat with hat, scarf, mittens – the works! Easter is cold around here, sometimes there’s even snow. Mother’s Day might feel like spring. Memorial Day, probably.
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I have a new dentist and at my recent appointment it came up that my daughter, now twenty, has never had a cavity. This dentist does not have children and is not a pediatric dentist, so she was intrigued. She began to ask questions about our at home dental routines because even though her practice does not include many children, she has plenty of parents as patients, and according to her, it is not the norm to make it to twenty without a cavity. As much as I wanted to claim it was my child’s pristine diet of raw milk, bone broth and sardines (ha!) that brought her to adulthood dentally unscathed, the truth is, as I shared with her, Adam and I took full charge of Emily’s dental care until she was ten years old. The expression on her face told me 1) I clearly haven’t mentioned this to too many people before, and 2) she had never heard of anyone doing this before. Which is exactly what she told me.
Great, why can't I ever be normal. (I was not brave enough to tell her we don’t use fluoride. Gasp!)
She asked for a few specifics, so I let her know we could not take credit for this rare parenting victory, that we only followed instructions from Emily’s pediatric dentist. When we took Emily for her very first appointment, maybe age two or three, we distinctly remember Dr. Lucy saying, “Everything looks great, now remember, her teeth are your responsibility until she is ten years old. She can do the morning brushing, that’s fine, but nighttime flossing and brushing is on you.” It might be the one piece of instruction I’ve ever followed in my life.
One might think once Emily turned ten she’d abandon our nighttime regimen, I wondered myself, but that didn’t happen. The habit of flossing and thorough brushing were so deeply ingrained in her at that point, we passed the torch with ease and she carried on. She’s off at college now and has a new dentist closer to school. I have to admit I was expecting a disruption in her perfect record with dorm life and the potential for changing habits, but she’s stayed on track and as of her last six month checkup, is still without cavities.
Not sure why I’m sharing this except to say that my new dentist (who I admit is on the young side, though I’ve reached the point in life where all medical professionals seem young) has never heard of this at-home practice before and she couldn’t seem to stop praising the idea. She said she was going to start recommending it to her patients with young children at home. So I thought maybe it is worth mentioning here, in case it can be an ah-ha moment for another parent, as it was for us. I guess we always thought there could be a correlation between our taking charge of Emily’s teeth and her absence of cavities, but we also thought maybe it was a fluke, too. After talking with this new dentist, I realized all that care and attention to the choppers didn’t hurt, that’s for sure.
Cheers to small parenting victories… because we all know we're 99% hacking our way through.