Grill Girl

My daughter got her braces this morning. She was a trooper - she was NOT happy to go, but went without a fight. I was actually the one crying since I had to hand over $1500 and that's just the down payment.

It was a two hour orthodontia session. (And you thought your day wasn't very much fun.) She is now calling them her "grillz" and saying Yo, a little bit too often. As she is whitey-white-white so this makes me wince because I'm afraid someone will overhear her and take it the wrong way.

We had to watch a video about how to brush your teeth with braces, and how to floss around them, and I'm tired already, and we haven't even done it yet since she ate lunch. We were misbehaving somewhat and making fun of the (very fine, informative) video because we watched it before the procedures began, so she was a bag of nerves. Caring for your teeth when you have orthodontics requires all sorts of extra doodads. Most boring goodie bag I ever got.

We don't have the FULL braces on top yet because I have to go pay another friendly dentist man to pull out four more of her baby teeth since none of them ever leave her body willingly. Then when the permanent teeth fill in we can get more wires and more insanely expensive cute colored bands.

The kids get to pick out the colors, and she chose hot pink and black for now. Yay. Four grand and change, and the only thing she's worried about is what colors to pick. How nice to be young. She goes back in October. Something tells me it will be orange and black then. I'm ok with that.

If you've never had braces, the thing on the bottom is a lip bumper. The muscles of your lips/face press against the bar, which is connected to the back teeth, and basically keep the bottom set of teeth from collapsing in on itself when she loses a couple of those baby teeth that still remain. Someday I'm going to bronze it. Or pound it with a sledgehammer in the back yard. I haven't decided yet.