All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth

Well, it turns out that Christmas has come early in the family M... This morning, while Daddy M was making her bottle I was lying on our bed playing with Olivia. I had just washed my hands so I didn't stop her when she grabbed one of my fingers and thrust it into her mouth. Frankly it made a change from her grabbing a handful of hair at each side of my face, yanking my head towards her and trying to use my jawbone as a teething toy!!

Anyway in goes the finger and she bit me. One thing I couldn't help but notice is that as if from nowhere she now has two front teeth. Yes my finger definitely noticed that and it wasn't even the one we had our eye on! In the spirit of blogging everything that ever happens to us for posterity, and so we can embarrass our darling daughter when she is 15, here they are!

Tiny child sighed in my ear

For those of you our there wondering if the family M had cleared off on yet another holiday then I am afraid no such luck for us...

Well it turns out that as well as teething the poor sausage also had gastroenteritis AGAIN! By Saturday it became clear the the loss of appetite wasn't just the front tooth that is threatening to pop put any second - the napppies said otherwise.

Unlike last time, when she happily took her full feed volume in electrolyte solution, this time she didn't wantly to drink hardly anything. She got quite poorly and on Monday I had to spoon feed her milk when she had only taken 10oz of fluid for the day. This was working out fine and she drank a few ounces until her gag reflex kicked in and she puked all over her own face. F compared it to looking like she was in a cowboy movie and had a bandana on her face so all you could see were her eyes. We also had a lot of leaky morning nappies and I have spent the last week solidly doing laundry as every morning, even if we changed her in the night she would have wet all her clothes, her growbag, the bed sheets etc.

Looks like she is on the mend now though. Her appetite is coming back slowly and the nappies are back to normal.

That tooth still hasn't popped out yet!

This World Sharpens Teeth

The numerous joys of motherhood...... no 10,424

Olivia is teething. She is fine in herself and happy to play but won't drink anything. She just cries every time you put the bottle in her mouth. This of course means she is waking up at stupid-o'clock in the morning, probably cause she is hungry. She also catagorically refuses to take Calpol so I am going to have to go and get a medicine syringe and squirt it down her - she may hate me for it in the short term but will thank me for it later :) She has a variety of teether toys to chew but generally anything she can get her hands on ends up in her mouth - soft toys (poor Teddy will never be the same), Mummy's arm, Mummy's hair...........

Various people have sworn by Ashton & Parsons Teething Powder, which apparently was put on the earth by angels to preserve the sanity of Mummies everywhere. I'll be visiting the chemist this afternoon!

Laughs as I Clean My Teeth...

Recently, Olivia has started to dribble. A lot.

Quite often, there's a damp ring of drool on her t-shirts, which is neither particularly aesthetically pleasing - not that she particularly cares, of course - nor very nice to wear. She's been sticking her mitts into her face at every available opportunity - and then wiping the slobber all over her mush. When she does deign to take the dummy, she seems to be pushing it to one side quite a lot of the time.

She's also been a little on the cranky side, though we couldn't, hand on heart, say that this has been more than normal. She still has plenty of smiles and perhaps this is nothing, but it could be the start of teething. K___'s mum and dad were down this weekend, and Grandma thinks she saw a white dot below the gum on the lower right. Perhaps this is the first tooth?

Apparently K___ got her milk teeth at about this time and was a bit of a mare. My parents say that I and my youngest brother sailed through teething, but that E___, the middle brother, was a right old mess, red raw from the waist down.

"Red raw from the waist down"? Eh..? This is the first I've ever heard of teething causing problems down below, but apparently it's quite common. It's because the babies are swallowing so much drool that it changes the PH of their stools, making them acidic. Nice..!

Well, we'll just have to wait and see, I suppose. We have thought she was teething before and proved wrong and it may be so this time also.