Alexander's teeth

Here's Alexander's sweet face yesterday morning:

His poor lip was still rather fat, as you can see:

But he was happy to report that he feels better:



We're being careful about what foods we offer him and I've been cutting up anything that might need to be bitten into very tiny pieces for him so that he can stuff them deep into his mouth so his back teeth can get straight to mashing, which he's so kindly demonstrating for a picture here:



He's thrown a lot of temper tantrums over things I've told him he can't have (a whole granola bar, apple slices, a big piece of cauliflower) but when I was doing a video interview with him today (perhaps I'll post the video if I can find it, but I think it's on my other camera (ie. not my phone)) he said that he was happy he feels better because that means he can eat! He really didn't eat much yesterday (or Tuesday afternoon) because things hurt too much. Today we discovered that he thought a few rather bland foods were "spicy" but I eventually figured out that when he was calling things "spicy" it was because he was trying to use his front teeth, so I'd remind him to only use his back teeth and things were suddenly not so spicy for him.

We had purple cauliflower with dinner, a favourite vegetable among the children, so I broke it up into teeny, tiny "trees" for him to stuff into his cheeks to chew. The plate was in front of him and he kept reaching out to grab more and I kept telling him to stop but he would not, so I had to keep taking cauliflower from him to break into small pieces so he could it eat. He was insatiable (now that he can eat again, I guess).

At one point he snaked his little hand over to the cauliflower plate again making little sound effects all the way. "Mmmmmmmmm..." he said as he reached toward the plate. Then he squeaked out a little, "Take!" as he stole his next piece of cauliflower.

Why didn't we move the plate away? Simple: our table is usually quite crowded and it would have taken a lot of rearranging to move that particular dish away from him. Also, I'm not really in the habit of discouraging my children from eating vegetables, so the fact that he was stealing cauliflower wasn't really problematic for me (except for the fact that it was raw and his little teefies are sore).

Here he is rocking a mustache bandaid before bed this evening:

He's much improved since Tuesday, which I'm so happy about (because I feel a sad every time I see his poor little face).