February 2017 – All the Joie

We had dreams of a big family, but then Finn started teething. He’s got 13.5 teeth, currently, and if he gets many more, he will forever be an only child.

Let’s just say, he doesn’t handle teething very well. This sweet child of ours is a delicate, delicate flower, and teething seems to throw every single aspect of his being off-kilter.

He’s currently cutting his top first molars (he blue ones, below); he cut the bottom ones a few weeks ago.

After that, we have the canines (which many say are worse than the molars), and then we should be in the clear for a bit.

DEAR GOD, I AM MORE AFRAID OF FINN’S GETTING CANINES THAN OF OUR SHIT-SHOW OF A GOVERNMENT, WHICH IS CLEARLY DRIVING OUR COUNTRY INTO ALL KINDS OF RUIN. True story.

Finn’s teeth were, generally, pretty late to the party. He entered his second year with only four teeth, and then they all come at once. The good news is that his response to teething is so dramatically terrible that it is unmistakable.

He drools. His face swells. He goes on a total hunger strike. He wakes up throughout the night, slamming his face into his mattress over and over, again. He gets diarrhea, which means he gets a diaper rash. He gets a runny nose and a cough. He becomes cranky as all get-out. He has frequent tantrums, which we’ve realized only happen when he’s sick. And, twice in the past couple of months, he gets an ear infection.

This is all to say, life in the Aquiline household becomes barely tolerable. At its worst, he had a two-week teething spell (those bottom molars took forever to erupt).

He has–and I’m not kidding–been teething non-stop since early December. We’ve had a couple of weeks of peace–weeks when our happy-go-lucky boy returns, but then the switch flips immediately and we feel in his mouth to confirm that, yup, his gums are swollen.

Sunday, he started acting a little funky. Monday, he refused dinner and slept pretty restlessly. By Wednesday, the Teething Monster had officially made himself known. His top left first molar erupted sometime in that span of days, and we’re working on his right molar, now. Yesterday was pretty awful. He wasn’t even cranky, he was just SO sad. All he wanted to do was get in bed with both of us, some chocolate milk, and the iPad. He held our hands as we watched The Grinch for the 187th time. It was beyond pitiful.

This morning, I checked and a jagged corner of his top left molar has finally broken through. His mood was radically improved, already.

I love our pediatrician, but she swears that teething should be completely uneventful. “It doesn’t cause them must discomfort,” she says. So, either Finn is the world’s biggest drama queen (which is totally possible), or she’s full of you-know-what.

And while I’m sure that parents use teething as a catch-all, blaming all of their adorable little turd’s behavior on teething symptoms, I’ve seen my son turn into a completely different child overnight, and the common denominator has always been an erupting tooth.

In just a few weeks, Sona and I are heading out of the country–our first trip alone since Finn was born. My parents will be here, doing the important work of keeping our son alive. God help them.

I know they are already doing us a tremendous favor, but let’s be honest: I pray every night that his canines hold on until our plane is off the runway, we have a spritz in our hand, and are blissfully ignorant of the teething-induced circus back at home.

My sweet Sona,

Sixteen years ago, today, we decided to give it a go. It was 2001. I was a freshman at the University of Tennessee at Martin, and you were a sophomore.

We’d met a few months earlier, when I had befriended your then girlfriend. (We won’t name names.) She had told me all about her “Indian princess,” who happened to be traveling with her mom for a semester. Turns out, your mother had torn you away from your life, hoping to take you away and straighten you up. I mean that, literally.

Lucky for me, that little endeavor failed pretty miserably.

I will never forget the first time we met. I was in my dorm room–McCord Hall–which, as I’m sure you remember, was completely decked out in all things Curious George. You walked in, wearing a purple tank top and a pink silk skirt. You seemed anxious and shy and completely overwhelmed by my obnoxious outwardness.

To say we didn’t hit it off is an understatement. I thought you were pretentious and uptight. You thought I was loud and aggressive. (We were both kind of right.)

Weeks passed. Then, one day, I was sitting with a group of friends in the cafeteria when I spotted you, sitting alone. You were eating an apple and reading some obscenely thick philosophical tome.