THE YEAR OF TEETH

These kids hurt themselves ALL THE TIME.

At least, it seems that way.

Within the past half hour, both the seven-year-olds have come to me to report injuries.

One bumped her face on the freezer (How? How?) and came to me crying. Once she stopped crying, she had to try to pull her lip down as far as possible to show me the ouchie inside her mouth, regardless of the times I've told the kids that I really can't put bandaids or medicine inside their mouths (there was no blood that I could see, so it must not have been that bad).

The other had her leg stepped on by the eighty-five pound labrador. I know, it really does hurt. He's done that to me, stepped on my bare feet. Those nails dig in. I know. It does hurt. But you gotta just keep going.

I always try to dish out the sympathy. I pat the back, I hug, I say, oh, I'm so sorry you're hurt. If appropriate, I offer bandaids and Neosporin.

But I have to admit, my heart isn't always in it. Sometimes I'm just going through the motions. They report everything to me--every little twinge of the body, every wrong done to them by a sister. Lillie says almost every night, "Ooh, I think I'm gonna barf." I don't know why. Maybe an upset stomach is the way her body signals it's bedtime. She never actually does barf. I don't think the kid has thrown up in the past year.

After a while, I just kinda go on autopilot. My first emotion on hearing crying is no longer, "Oh, the poor baby." It's, "AGAIN? Didn't we just do this?"

It's made worse by the fact that they are at that age where their teeth are shedding like hair, it seems. They lose teeth at school. They lose teeth at church. They lose teeth at home. I guess it seems like so many teeth because there are two of them the same age. Somebody's always losing a tooth, or dealing with a tooth that is so loose that she can twist it around in her mouth.

For some reason, they feel it is necessary to show me all of this. Look, the bottom of my tooth is black. (That's okay, it's about to fall out anyway.) Look, blood. (That's normal when you lose a tooth. Just rinse your mouth, you'll be all right.)

But I do try to be sympathetic. My husband, Fred, says that when he was a little kid, he tried to hide his injuries from his mom, because she would yell at him. Now, I know that sounds awful. I think it's something that he, and I, didn't understand before we had multiple kids ourselves. What kind of mom would yell at a kid for hurting himself?

Fred's mom had six kids, and from the sound of it, he was a bit accident-prone. Unlike our girls' imaginary stomachaches or minuscule ouchies, he made numerous trips to the emergency room for stitches. On one memorable occasion, he was coasting down the driveway in a wagon and got his hand caught under it, dragging his hand the length of the driveway. He still has the scar. I think his mom's reaction was due to having to suddenly figure out what to do with multiple little kids while she took the bleeding one to the hospital.

I try to remember that we don't want our kids to think they have to hide bad stuff from us, so I sympathize with the ouchies, with the reports that sister was mean to me again, with the lost teeth.