Dentist

"That's IT, young lady! If you don't start behaving, I'm NOT taking you to the dentist!"
I said that.
Yep, just this morning.
How many kids do you suppose you could successfully leverage the threat of a cancelled dental appointment with?

None?
Maybe a couple-right after Hell froze over with little pigs circling like seagulls in the sky?

Well She-Who-Worships-Pink immediately dissolved into a flood of tears:
"I'm SORRY!" 
"WAAAAAAH- please, PLEASE- I want to go to the DENTIST!!!"
"I'm so SORRY mummy!!!!"

This is not normal behaviour for a child-I know that. Neither is her obsession with her plaque...
But over the past few months, the Daddy Person and I have come to realise that trying to engender awareness in our child often creates obsessions.

Like the petrol thing.
Somehow I got roped into a discussion on petrol being poisonous (a long story) during which I mentioned that some silly people sniff it for fun and even sniffing it can make you sick enough to die if you do it a lot. So now Pinkster goes nuts in the service station every time I fill up, because she can smell the petrol and therefore, she will probably will die.

Yup.
A few too many frank discussions going on between the booster and the driver's seats I'm afraid. Mummy is merrily galloping through mine-fields and not even aware of it.

But some things you tell them just don't stick at all.  Like for the the past six months I've tried in vain to explain to Pinkster that twirling around the bathroom wafting a buzzing electric toothbrush through the air, while discussing the tooth fairy, does not actually get one's teeth clean.

Or in fact maintain them in any marketable shape that, said fairy, would be enticed to pay good money for.

So we had the plaque discussion. I brought in a magnified mirror and showed her the tiny build-up between two of her bottom teeth. I even used a dental plaque tool and scraped a bit off by way of a demo.

I know got the point across finally because she's brushing her teeth properly, diligently even perhaps a bit excessively.  But she 'watches' her plaque obsessively. When she rinses and spits, she scours the porcelain looking for bits of plaque. The plaque scraper is now a daily request.

So this is how she ended up in the dentist's chair, for the first time, this morning - holding a mirror, fascinated and clearly elated, as she watched all the plaque get polished off.

Half an hour after, at school, she marched around the playground grinning at her friends like the Cheshire cat...

.. reactions were mixed.

As the school bell rang she asked, panicking, how she would brush her 'new shiny' teeth after lunch.

"You have an apple sweetie, that will clean your teeth" and as I left I was thinking; 'Dear God, don't let her start asking for half a dozen apples everyday'.

 Linking up with the Multitasking Mummy