As mothers, we always want to do what is best for our children. We go to bat for them every moment they need us to, and we are their biggest advocate in life. And a couple months ago I felt like a failure to my oldest son. We went for a dental check up, and learned he needed some pretty extensive dental surgery.

I thought I had been doing everything right. I thought brushing twice a day was going to sufficient in keeping his teeth healthy. I thought wrong. A mixture of not flossing, and dietary choices (FUCKING FRUIT SNACKS) had caused some pretty serious cavities.

We had two choices.

1) 5 trips to the dentist to have cavities filled, and teeth capped. Each with him being wide awake with novocaine and scared shitless of what is going on. OR
2) Go into the hospital, and be put under general anesthesia and have all the work done at once, for about three hours.

After mulling over it for a couple days, my husband and I agreed to go with option number two since it would be less traumatic to our son. I think overall it was most traumatic to us as parents. It is also something I never want to go through again. EVER.

But the moral of the story is what the dentist taught us. What we should be excluding from his diet, and what he should be having more of. The first thing was NO FRUIT SNACKS. No kind of gummy snacks or candy. No gum. Nothing. EVER. It gets down in between the teeth and even with extensive flossing, cannot be removed fully. Leading to the growth of cavities in between teeth. Parents… seriously, I beg you to dump the fruit snacks!  DO IT!  Go into your kitchen and throw them all away. NOW!

The second was only having water or milk at bedtime. We let the boys have a lot of juice, even with the teeth brushing that time of night, it wouldn’t eliminate the leftover juice from the mouth meaning of course more issues.

Lastly? FLOSS! I don’t care if you have to put your little one in a headlock or some kind of WWE wrestling move… do it! They may hate you for that moment, but in the end when they don’t have to go through anything horrible like we did, they will thank you.

I promise you!

Don’t be stupid, and learn from the mistakes we made that we didn’t even know we were making!

To read more about Oral Health thanks to OraLine Kids, check out these two posts :

Bringing Fun to Healthy Teeth
OraLine Kit Review – A New Way to Fight Germs!

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Tags: dentist, oral health, oraline kids, review, teeth

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 10:14 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.