Skip to main content

Willow's tooth-brushing goes from rocky to rocking

Willow has been giving us fits for months now about brushing her teeth before bed. She's usually better brushing her teeth in the morning, meaning it's less like wrestling an alligator for me, but at night before bed, she turns into the Tasmanian Devil.
We've tried making the tooth-brushing as fun as possible for her, but I usually end up holding her against her will while I try, mostly in vain, to pry the toothbrush into her clamped-shut mouth. Sometimes we give up.
We've tried singing to her. Dancing. Story-telling. Tickling. Nothing has really worked.
But Mommy might have hit on the solution.
A singing toothbrush.
Yesterday Mommy brought home a toothbrush that belts out Queen singing "We Will Rock You."
This toothbrush ROCKS!
And Willow loves it.
We tried it out last night, and on the inaugural brushing, Willow brushed her teeth successfully all by herself. She danced the whole time too. And I stayed bruise free (I also, surprisingly, had more energy left in the tank to stay up and watch football; wrestling an alligator, after all, takes an immense amount of energy).
And this morning ... this morning ...
Hold on, I'm about to cry here ...
This morning ...
<sniff>
This morning Willow brushed her teeth for six full minutes! Without my "helping" at all. That's, like, three tooth-brushings in one, folks!
I think we have this thing conquered.
Now we just have to figure out how to stop her from throwing whole plates of food to the floor.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

With baby comes packing (and a lot of it)

Willow, Che and I are traveling to see the grandparents, aunts, cousins and Mos (or is it Moes or is it Mo's or is it Moses?) in Henderson, Tenn., this weekend. And that brings up one of the big differences between being a couple without kids and being a couple with kids: packing for travel (they even have an app for that, God bless us packing-weary parents). Back in my pre-child days, packing hardly mattered, probably taking up 1 zillionth of a tenth of a percent of my brain capacity to do (six days equals six days of socks and underwear plus some T-shirts, some shorts, a pair or two of pants, put on some shoes, throw in some toothpaste, and I was off). That's hardly the case anymore. Take, for example, if you have a spit-up-prone baby. Do you take two burp clothes, four, eight or, maybe, 16? Better take 24. And how many diapers do you take? Or wipes? Do I need to take baby medicine? Is it going to be cold or warm or cold and warm or warm and hot then ... AACK!!! You get t...
2 comments
Read more

Summer zips on by

I guess it's official. This morning, we witnessed the kiddos hopping on school buses and heading to school. That marks the end of summer, I suppose, and the end of summer seems to come a little earlier every year (even though the actual warmness of the weather keeps creeping later and later; are we going to have winter this year, anyone?). Call me silly, but I like to think of the end of summer as that day on the calendar that falls in the middle of September, after my birthday (my birthday, Sept. 16, is in summer, but it has never, ever felt that way even though I know it's always hot on my birthday). This marks my 39th summer if you count that first one I was born during in 1974, and I'm sure many of them seemed really long or really short depending on how old I was. For me, it seemed like the summers of my childhood lasted FOREVER. Now it seems like they zip by. In a flash. Especially this one. It's been a busy one, filled with lots of travels, family visits and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Willow hones her friend-making skills

Up until now Willow has enjoyed the company of other tots her age only in the sense that where they are is where the fun and the toys are. That is to say she likes the toys and the gyms and the swings and if she has to be around these other toddlers, so be it. That's with kids her own age. She LOVES older kids, but they don't care much for her (other than "she's a baby," and Willow can't keep up with them, though she tries). Her older cousin, Rett, for example, hung the stars and moon in her opinion, so she'll just about do anything he does, including cozying up with him on the chair to watch a movie. And he does like her more than the typical older kid does. But as far as all the toddlers and babies roughly in Willow's age range, she doesn't have much use for them. She's not mean to them. She'll let them take a ball from her hand, for example (as some say, she plays well with others). But I can tell you, most definitely, she just doesn...
Post a Comment
Read more