The Mom Who Cried Molars.

I’ve literally taken hundreds of thousands of pictures since Forest was born and all of these photos are eating up the memory on my external hard drive. We are finding many memory solutions, but one fix is to go through and delete all the fuzzy, blurry or redundant pictures that are just eating up space. It took me nearly an hour to just get through April 2015, and each delete felt like a knife to the heart as I sorted through Forest’s fleeting babyhood and decided which memories were worth saving. 

The point of this post is not to drive down memory lane and get nostalgic, but to remember how certain I was that Forest was teething last Easter. The pics of him in his Easter Jammies were heavily photoshopped as I painstakingly tried to cover up the copious amount of drool pooling out of his mouth.   

Drool + tears = teeth....right????

He had cut 16 teeth by the time he turned 14 months, and since he was always such an early teether getting teeth 2-3 months before his buddies, we were expecting the ‘2 year molars’ to make their appearance well before his second birthday. 

6 teeth at 6 months

A full mouth of teeth by 14 months

So when he became a sleep deprived cranky drooling mess around the 17 month point, we braced ourselves for another round of nightmarish molars. But when the symptoms passed after 2 weeks with no teeth to show for it, we were left scratching our heads in confusion. 

At 22 months we had a similar phase and I swore that when his mouth was wide open from his constant wailing, I could spot teeth just under his gums. But yet nothing ever surfaced. 

At 23 months he had a few nights in a row where he’d wake up, cry for 2 minutes and then go back to sleep and we were sure that this time it was the real deal and he was teething. And yet….nothing. 

When Jon’s parents came to visit for Forest’s birthday, his mom commented that she was sure he was teething. I plopped my finger in his mouth only to get a hard bite down by my toddler, but not before I confirmed that there was no tooth coming through.   

By this time, I was feeling like the mom who cried molars. I had been burned more than 4 times thinking ‘This is it! The last set of teeth are coming through which explains why my child is being a monster!’ But when the crisis passed and we had no teeth to show for the misery, I was baffled and confused and frustrated. Why the hand chewing, drooling, night waking, short naps and 8 poops a day (TMI?) if he wasn’t teething???? 

So when a week ago Forest started taking crazy short naps and waking super early, I didn’t even think of teething. I was scrounging sleep training sites about if he could possibly be dropping his naps completely and chalked it up to the 2 year sleep regression and assumed his crankiness and resistance at meal times was due to him being overtired. Then on Thanksgiving, I was giving him fish kisses (his new favorite thing) and when he opened his mouth to receive his fishy kissy I spotted something white on the inside of his gum. 

I instantly popped my finger inside his mouth and felt that long awaited tooth poking through. I started jumping up and down and yelling to Jonathan ‘We have a tooth! We have a tooth!’. He rolled his eyes not believing this claim since I had ‘thought’ I saw teeth back there many times before. But Jon played along, sat Forest up on the kitchen island and bravely felt around his gums for confirmation. When it was confirmed that I was not crazy and that a molar had indeed broken the skin we all started high 5-ing. Forest was yelling ‘Tooth! Tooth!’ probably having no idea the significance of the accomplishment. 

But it just explains so much and y’all I was having a rough week! I haven’t cried this much or been this frustrated with him since…..well probably since the last time he cut teeth back at 13 months. It is just such a relief to know that there is a reason for his crummy sleeping and whiny behavior and fruit strike and that this state of affairs is hopefully not the new normal but just a result of teething discomfort and pain. I put Orajel on his gums before his nap Thursday and he took his longest nap in 2 weeks. Phew! (Of course then he went and caught a cold which has him all screwed up again so our victory was short lived. Sigh.)

We are gearing up for a long few weeks as all 4 molars break the skin, but at least now I have something to blame the struggles on. And best of all, it is something that is temporary and will pass! I think the hardest part with parenting first time kiddos is not knowing if something is a temporary phase or the new status quo. I was thinking ‘oh gosh- is this the terrible twos because it is indeed TERRIBLE!!!’, and I’m sure that developmental phase is part of it, but it’s also nice to know that the terrible 2-year molars are also partly to blame! 

My apologies to my family who will be spending Christmas with a potentially cranky toddler (the same thing happened last year as he teethed his canines over our trip home), but maybe they will be all in by then. Fingers crossed they all come in swiftly!  The best thing about the 2 year molars is that they are the final teeth! Woohoo. I have literally been saving a bottle of sparkling wine for exactly this occasion. Once that final molar pops through we are definitely breaking out the bubbly!  

Source (my attitude about the last molars!!! I really need this shirt.)