Un-Brace Your Face Day

...aka "The Great Brace Erase".

Yesterday I got to leave work early and meet Sis at her orthodontist for the great unveiling. This has been 3 1/2 years in the making, with nearly every orthodontic appliance known to man installed in her mouth.

(Ya know why they call them "appliances"? Because you could've bought brand new appliances for your kitchen with what it costs to straighten your kids' teeth, that's why! I guess it's some sort of sadistic orthodontic joke or something. At least that's my take on it.)

At any rate, I've gotta hand it to Sis, because first she had to have an expander put in the roof of her mouth that not only made her talk like Sylvester the Cat (thufferin' thuccotash!), but that with the help of me and a handy-dandy mini allen-wrench, broke apart her palate to make room in her mouth to start her treatment.

THEN, she had to have oral surgery and they went up into her gums and hooked a CHAIN on a tooth that never emerged, for lack of room, and they basically winched the sucker down into place like you'd winch a Jeep out of a rock slide. (The winching took months, mind you, as teeth are more difficult to move than Jeeps.)

Then it was power chains, and rubber bands in all kinds of wacky configurations, molar bands, springs, wires and any other kind of contraption they could think of that would help rearrange her teeth into a proper and attractive alignment.

And ya know what? Not once did she whine or complain about it. Seriously, I can't think of a time. She REALLY wanted her teeth fixed and she was so good about everything.

We knew at her first appointment it was going to be a long haul, because her ortho declared her one of the worst cases he'd ever seen (and he's a specialist that teaches orthodontics, so I don't think he was exaggerating.)

It was hard to believe the day was finally here, and she was finished! Done! Complete!

The last Brace-Faced smile.

And...they're off! (Took only a minute. They just popped them right off.)

The retainers. She got to choose colors and design them. She brought in a little heart sticker that they embedded into the one on the right (her top one) in which she chose clear glitter as the base. The bottom one is glow-in-the-dark green.

(I just couldn't get over the retainers. When I got my braces off they gave me a big rubber mouthpiece retainer (kinda like a sports mouth protector)to wear at night, and it was horrible. I gave up on it after about a week. Had I got to design my own retainer and had something reasonable to wear like Sis' wire ones my teeth would still be perfect.)

The orthodontist gave her some gift certificates for ice cream so that's how we celebrated! Look at that beautiful smile!

A Wake Up Call Dream

I hate it when I have one of those dreams where I wake up with my heart pounding.

Last night I had one of those.

I dreamt that some "bad guy" was trying to get into the house and only me and the little girls were home. I got to the door and locked it just as he was turning the knob to enter. I was yelling at him through the door that I was calling 9-1-1 and getting a gun, however I knew that was just a threat (9-1-1 never works in my dreams for some reason.)

I wanted to get us out of the house and run, but I realized that there was only one door we could get out of and that's where the bad guy was.

I went back to my room and was trying to figure out how to open the gun safe and realized I didn't know the combination. I thought I knew where Mike hid it -- in another little locked box, but had no idea where the key to that was. About this time the bad guy was there with me insisting that I open the safe for him so he could have the guns. I was trying to tell him I didn't know!

Somehow the girls and I ran out the door and past the bad guy's idleing car in front of our house, I decided against stealing it and we ran through the streets of our neighborhood instead. I remember we were barefooted and the pavement was icy and cold (as it really is right now.)

We ran around the corner and I realized that we didn't really have anyone in the neighborhood that we knew really well who I could run to in this kind of emergency. That felt pretty scary. I finally decided on a lady who babysat the girls a few years back. Just as we were getting to her house, the bad guy came down the hill in his car and spotted us.

That's when I woke up.

As I lay in bed trying to recover I realized that all the scenarios from my dream were true: two of our three doors are currently blocked with snow, I didn't know how to access the guns, we are so far flung that actually getting help from 9-1-1 in the form of a sheriff would likely be a very long wait (thankfully if we needed the fire dept. they are only a mile away), our feet would freeze if we had to run out of our house in an emergency, and we don't have anyone in the neighborhood that we know really well.

I thought about all this and decided we need to sleep with our snow boots next to our beds in case we need to get out of the house in an emergency. The girls can go out the back door from their bedroom, but wouldn't be able to go far in several feet of snow with no boots.

Then today I told Mike about my dream and he showed me how to get to the guns if I should ever need to. That made me feel better.

I can also start getting to know the neighbors better.

My dream taught me that we need to have a plan. It's unlikely that a "bad guy" would come in and attack us, probably more likely we would need to evacuate because of fire, but ya never know. It's good to have a Wake Up Call Dream.