Zack has been a thumb sucker since the day he was born. We attempted in vain to stop him right at the beginning. Then about 6 months before we moved we tried to stop the thumbsucking again and it was successful. However, literally as we were driving across the country to our new home I looked back to see his thumb back in his mouth. I guess the stress of the move made him digress a little. So last Friday my sweet little thumb sucking Zack Man had to get a retainer put in his mouth to try and fix the damage he has caused to his poor teeth. Apparently he has a cross bite. I'd never even heard of that. I've heard of under bites and over bites and don't let us forget Garrett bites! But never a cross bite. On the right side especially his top teeth are on the inside of the bottom instead of lined up right on top. It looks a lot worse on the back teeth. I thought about taking a picture of the actual retainer in his mouth but since I think the insides of peoples mouths look kind of gross, I decided to spare you all the details. Anyway, the dentist said if left uncorrected he could develop TMJ (temporal mandibular Joint) disorder which is very painful and most insurances won't cover the treatments for it. So we ponied up the cash (luckily we have good insurance that paid for half) and got it done. There have been a few unpleasant side effects.
1) He has a major drooling problem now. He can just be playing or eating or watching TV and all of a sudden a huge glob of spit will just randomly burst forth and land on anything or anyone in the near vicinity.
2) He was just starting to talk really good and now all his "s" sounds sound a little spitty and are sometimes accompanied by the above mentioned #1 problem.
3) When I brush his teeth he acts like it hurts and he will randomly sort of choke and then spit in my face. Yes...it is very gross!
But we love the little tyke enough to just deal with all the drool and to try and understand what he is saying for the next 3-4 months. Hopefully he won't have his retainer longer than that! One really great thing has come out of this whole ordeal though. His thumb doesn't fit in his mouth anymore because the retainer blocks it. So he hasn't sucked his thumb in 5 days! Yay!
1 comment:
Owen ALWAYS has two fingers in his mouth. I don't know how to get him to stop though. I've put bandaides on them which stopped him for a little bit, but then he figured out how to pull the bandaides off. Hopefully he will outgrow it. I also sucked 2 fingers until I was about 9 years old, it didn't do too much damage, so I'm hoping Owen will be OK. I think he started sucking his fingers because we didn't give him a pacifier very often...we didn't want to have to wean him off it. I think weaning him off his fingers will be worse though...you can't really cut his fingers off! I think the new baby will probably have a pacifier more often.
Good luck with the retainer!
Post a Comment