So around here one of the milestones I've been waiting on is for Francesca to lose her first tooth. I noticed that all of the other children in her class look like little jack 'o lanterns and it got me wondering when in the heck my girl was going to start shedding some incisors. So finally about two months ago we realized one of her bottom teeth was slightly loose. FINALLY! She was nearly seven!
Anyhow, about a month after that, I noticed something else: Her adult tooth was coming through behind the baby tooth. That's when I started prodding her to get serious about the wiggling. So she did, and it did get looser but still it hung on and hung on. I started getting impatient and wanted that tooth out of there because by the time her birthday was near, that adult tooth was 1/2 way in. But her birthday came and went, and still that tooth was loose, but not out. I gave myself a "call the dentist" deadline, but on the day of the deadline she made so much progress with it, that I knew I wouldn't have to take her to get it pulled anymore.
On Thursday night, I'd had enough and decided we needed to pull it ourselves. So up to the bathroom we went and with minty dental floss I tied a slippery knot around the thing. I let her fiddle with it for about 5 minutes before I got the courage to grab the floss and give her tooth the yank it needed. Not wanting to go wimpy on the thing and possibly not pull hard enough, making things worse, I jerked my arm really fast and out popped the tooth! We heard a "clink!" and no more. She was surprised I pulled it but said it didn't hurt. I was BUMMED because we lost the darn thing! It really is gone, I've checked.
However, I was glad to have it out, requiring no dentist calls and her big tooth looks super cute in its new spot.
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| Seth, Clara, Catie, Miriam, Nicholas, Hannah Adam, Naomi, Nattie, James, Matthew, Frannie, Kathy Frannie is having a great first grade year overall. She's really doing well in math. She's improving steadily in her reading although I'm not sure I'd say it is her best subject. But she works at it and is doing just fine. She's still doing her piano lessons and I'm really excited because I think we've finally found a system to help her practice. For the past 3 or 4 months she has been doing ok at piano but really not quite good enough simply because she doesn't practice enough. As she's introduced to more skills the practicing gets harder and she complains more and I haven't been super-disciplined about her having a set time to practice etc... Sometimes when she's complaining about it I've wondered if we should just throw in the towel on the thing, but something inside of me always says "No." So I've talked about it with Jason and we both agree that this is good for her and she should continue and we just need to figure something out with the practicing. So here's what we're doing now and it has worked really well for the past two weeks and I hope it keeps working! Basically I've told her that her lesson costs $15 a week and she's going to be paying for her lesson now, and the way she earns money for her lesson is that each daily practice session is worth $3. So she has to practice 5 days a week to have the money for her lesson, but if she practices more she can still earn more. And if she practices less, then she'll have to take the rest from her other money. Each day that she practices I physically hand her the three dollars that she puts into her piano bag. I feel like this very physical exchange may be helping her to understand that the time she puts in is worth something and her songs are sounding SO much better! The first two days of wrestling with the new songs seem to be the hardest, but after that it really starts coming together. It is music to my ears seriously! |
