Metal Mouth!

This morning Houston and Katrina got to go to the orthodontist. Woo!

We didn't know what they were going to do to Katrina yet, because they had done all of the molds and whatnot, but the orthodontist was still trying to determine the best course of action. So when she got called back, i got to go with her to talk to the orthodontist. She (the ortho) looked at Katrina's teeth from all angles, because "they just looked really different on the X-ray than on the pictures...." And then she was all, "Okay. So. There are three courses of action we could take. The first and most aggressive course of action is surgery. We would break her jaw and pull the bottom jaw forward. That involves an overnight stay in the hospital and about 2 weeks of not being able to eat, and it's pretty miserable, but the end product is that her chin would be pulled forward."

Katrina and me: "........."

Orthodontist: "Yeah. people are usually either really for or really against that one. Option two is that we could pull a couple of teeth from the top, which would pull the top teeth back and line up the bite that way."

Kat and me: "Yeah. Um. I mean, we'd rather not pull teeth if possible?"

Ortho: "The third option is that we can fix the bite as best we can with braces and lots of rubberbands, and just accept that in the end she'll still have a little bit of an overbite."

Kat and me: "Yeah. That sounds good." Because honestly, it's not like we're doing braces for cosmetic reasons, because Katrina is already gorgeous and her teeth don't bother her. We just want to fix them so that in the future her teeth and her bite don't give her problems. A bit of an overbite is FINE.

So she just got spacers today, which will be exchanged for expanders next week, and they're going to just do expanders for a while until the top jaw is a bit more rounded and less crowded. So she's going to get that gap between her front teeth for a bit.

Meanwhile, Houston actually DID get braces on today! He looks so cute with them! I asked if it hurt when they put them on, and he said, "No. Not really. But when they were taking the old appliance off, it really felt and sounded like they were breaking my teeth apart! Because they just had to break them off of the teeth!!!"

So far, Houston's only complaint is "I just don't know what to do with my lips. Nothing feels normal." And Katrina's just started bothering her after bedtime, so she took some ibuprofin and will hopefully sleep pain-free. Yay!