We recently experienced one of our scariest moments with Kaiya thus far. I thought the bee sting at 13 months was bad, but that was nothing. Andrej, Kaiya and I were playing in the kitchen floor while our chicken casserole was in its last few minutes of baking before dinner. Kaiya was signing hungry over and over, so to keep her from starving I went ahead and gave her a sippy cup of milk.

She was running around the kitchen and diving in Andrej’s arms. On one of her rounds she accidentally tripped over my foot and fell abruptly into Andrej. She immediately started screaming the infamous toddler scream with a wide open mouth that is silent for a few seconds before the wail comes. Andrej and I looked at each other confused because she really hadn’t hit anything hard. She didn’t hit the tile floor, just Andrej’s leg. On her second open-mouth-silent-before-the-wail cry, I caught a glimpse of blood. I jumped up from the floor and told Andrej that I thought she had bitten her tongue because there was blood.

Andrej held Kaiya up to me for further inspection and I had to slowly lower myself back to the floor to keep from passing out. Her mouth was full of blood and one of her bottom teeth was sticking out horizontally. I told Andrej what I saw and that I felt very sick. He immediately jumped into gear and rinsed her mouth out so he could get a better look himself, all while calming Kaiya. I was useless. All I could do was concentrate on keeping any contents of my stomach in its place. Once the chaos passed and Kaiya was calm Andrej got a better look at the tooth and decided we should call our dentist right away. It looked like the tooth was about to fall out. He also figured out the she had fallen with her sippy cup in her mouth and that was what jammed into the tooth.

The more bad news he shared with me the longer I had to lie on the floor. Andrej quickly got in touch with our dentist who told him what to look for and by that time the tooth wasn’t sticking out quite so far. Our dentist offered to meet us at his office right then, or we could wait until morning. Since Kaiya had stopped crying and was playing, the bleeding had stopped and it was dinner time, we decided it could wait until morning.

Instead of feeding Kaiya the chicken casserole I scrambled her eggs, which she ate without any problems. We topped it off with yogurt and banana slices and she was ready for a bath and bed. We gave her Motrin just in case she was in pain, and she slept incredibly well the entire night. In fact we all overslept the next morning and unfortunately by the time we rushed to the dentist office we had missed him. We did speak with him on the phone later that day and decided since Kaiya was able to eat and didn’t seem to be in pain we would just wait until Monday and see him during normal working hours.

When we met with the dentist, his diagnosis was that Kaiya would have a snaggle tooth until she lost her baby teeth. He didn’t see any signs of infection or that the tooth was dying so she would be fine and there wouldn’t be any need to try and move the tooth back to its original position. It really doesn’t look that bad, but it is noticeable. The lessons we learned are that I am no good when blood is involved and running with sippy cups (or any hard object) in our mouths is not a good idea.