Streeeeeeeeeetch

Well, it has begun.

I took Timothy back to the orthodontist last week for his doctor to install Timothy’s jaw-widener spacer thing. (I don’t really remember them giving it a name, but I may have just forgotten.) This next bit I will describe what it is and why he needs it, so if you are at all squeamish about teeth, I suggest you skip this post altogether.

The widener is basically an appliance that loops around his back molars and has a span across the top bridge of his mouth (if you’d like a visual of it, you can check out this picture; I’m not posting it here for the teeth-queasy). Every night for the next two weeks we get to turn it a little bit, thus widening Timothy’s upper jaw. We go back in two weeks for an evaluation on how things are going.

If you follow either Jared or I on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll know some of this already. Timothy is 8. He has his front two teeth in, but the top teeth next to his front teeth have not come in yet. Looking at his x-rays, you can see them sitting just below the gum line, but they have not dropped because there is no where for them to drop. Those teeth should have been in already. This jaw widener is part of Phase 1.

The next part, once the jaw has been widened enough, is to put braces on his front teeth in order to pull them together in order to make room so those other teeth can come in. Getting those teeth to drop in is the goal for Phase 1. (Yes, this means that we will be going back to the orthodontist when he gets a little older to work on other problems relating to his little mouth.) His doctor assured me that normally he doesn’t like to intervene this early – he’d rather wait until they are older – but this was a case where we needed to get started now or there would be serious problems later.

As a side note, Timothy already had two of his baby molars removed because of the way his permanent teeth were resorbing into his baby teeth (they put spacers in to keep the gap between his teeth). He won’t get those teeth back until he’s 10 or 12. But the good news is that we skipped a step in getting his widener in because he didn’t have those teeth to get in the way of the widener.

The doctor has assured us that he should not be in pain for this widener step, and Timothy has told us that mostly it is just weird for him. He feels a little pressure in his nose every time we turn it, but for the most part his problems come from talking and eating. Because it stretches over the bridge of his mouth, it interferes with how he places his tongue to make sounds. It also means chewy and sticky stuff are off of his menu again (he had a bit of a free reign between Christmas – when the took out his spacers to size him and mold his mouth for the widener – and last Thursday).

Poor kid. He’s been quite the trooper about it all though, at least thus far. I made sure he understood exactly what was going to happen during these steps and why we were doing it. He seems to be coping well, but it has only been since Thursday. It is getting easier for him to talk (he still has a hard time making some sounds), but I know he’s feeling a bit better because he was singing tonight just for fun.

So at the end of it all (I have no idea how long Phase 1 is expected to take), my boy will likely have a different-looking smile, but I bet he still won’t like it when I take his picture.