Soccer and Lost Teeth

When Merrick was little there were often times when things would come up and I would sit down and blog about them right away and so it was not uncommon for me to write more then one blog post each week.  Unfortunately, now with two kids, a job, and three callings, I am lucky to get one blog squeezed in on Sunday.  The consequence of this is that sometimes really important events get buried under even more important events and get lost in the shuffle.  Merrick has had a couple of such events over the last few weeks.

Last weekend (Halloween) was Merrick's last soccer game.  He and his whole team worked really hard this season and the improvement was evident.  Most games he scored at least one goal and learned to play both offense and defense.  We had an experience the last game that really impressed me.  The weather was terrible.  I am talking bitter, gale-force winds and we were about half way through the game when Merrick came over to us saying that his shoe had broken.  It turns out that the sole of his cleat had separated from his shoe on about half the shoe.  In a truly Macgyver like move, Jeremy took off his own shoe lace and used it to tie the sole of Merrick's cleat back on.  What really impressed me is that Merrick got right back into the game, despite the weather and his broken shoe.  I was surprised by his ability to overcome adversity and still have a good time.  At the awards ceremony after the game Merrick's coach talked about him having a big future with soccer and I am sure that will be the case.

The other big thing that has happened for Merrick is that he has lost not one, but two teeth over the last month.  I know I already blogged about our discovery of his permanent tooth growing in behind his baby tooth, but eventually it did push out both of his two front teeth.  The story of the first one coming out was a bit traumatic.  It had been loose for several days and we had tried to pull it with no success.  One night, after talking to his dad, Jeremy decided to tie thread (he had tried floss, but had not gotten it low enough).  This time he got the thread nice and low and tried to pull, but it still was not coming out (the problem was that the tooth behind had pushed the tooth forward and separated the roots in the back, but not in the front).  Jeremy ultimately decided to leave it once again only to discover that the thread was stuck.  The tooth did not want to come out, but neither did the thread.  At this point Merrick flipped out and Jeremy really had no choice but to yank both the tooth and thread out.

Once the trauma was done, Merrick was really proud of his new smile.  I think he particularly liked that later that night the tooth fairly came and brought him a certificate for his tooth and some origami money.  It was only a day or two later that he discovered his other front tooth was loose and Merrick got to work on wiggling it right away.

And now that I have finally gotten these memories in writing I can ramp my mommy guilt down a couple of notches.