Baby Teeth[ing]

During most of Shlomo’s first year, every time he wasn’t feeling well, we were told that he was teething.  At first I believed it; after a while, it started sounding dumb.  Later, we believed it again, because, after all, you can’t have a ten-month old who isn’t teething, right?

Whenever I started to worry, I comforted myself that I had never heard of a baby who didn’t get teeth.  Since both Yitzchak and I got our teeth pretty late, we figured that “late gene + late gene = super late gene”.  And so it was.  Shlomo got his first tooth two weeks after his birthday.

Ten months later, he has twelve teeth, and I can see the bottom canine teeth about to appear.  (Have you ever?!  When was the last time a baby got twelve teeth in nine months?!*)  This means that these past three nights, when he hasn’t been sleeping well, were probably not because of the molars that are nearly finished (which didn’t make sense to me, but I didn’t have any other ideas), but because of the canines that are about to appear.  Which means that we’ve been putting the teeth medicine in the wrong spot.  Well, that explains why it hasn’t been working, doesn’t it?  I was beginning to think that I was crazy, and just calling the difficulty sleeping “teething pain,” when it really wasn’t.  Now I feel better. :sheepish:

I just looked up how many primary teeth there are – and it turns out that after these two bottom canines come in, we have six left.  Not too bad, huh?  If he hurries, he’ll get all of his teeth within one year, and set a world record.

Bonus: Without looking it up on the internet, tell me how many primary teeth there are.  Yes, that means to do the math in the post.

*Nine, because the molars first appeared about a month ago.