Saturday, April 04, 2009

I should have known.

Addison has this funky rash. It starts like small red bumps, at first I thought it may have been a spider bite. Then it multiplies and get red and irritated and then dries up and disappears. She has had it for a month.

Her skin is super sensitive compared to my other children. It seems she breaks out from everything/anything. Her bottom gets red at the slightest exposure to a wet or soiled diaper. I started blaming it on the diaper brands, but I think it is just her skin.

I have been keeping an eye on this rash, waiting for it to define itself. I have asked people about it, googled it, asked the dr. about it, medicated it with a topical and an ingested med. Nothing gets rid of it for good.

I began to wonder if it was her body letting me know that she was teething. I have read and read about the changes in your body when you get teeth. Changes in bowels, fevers...it made perfect sense.

I thought her eye teeth were coming in. Every dramatic intervention to see or feel her gums led to nothing. No sign of teeth. Red, swollen gums would appear for days at a time and then they would disappear.

Until this morning.

Addison LOVES brushing her teeth. She rubs the brush along her gums back and forth for 10 minutes at a time. I think she would sleep with a toothbrush if I let her.
So today while she was scrubbing her mouth, I noticed a white chunk of skin on her gum. It was a large piece of skin that's why it was so noticeable as it was flapping back and forth around the tiny toothbrush head.

I wrestled her to the ground and pried open her mouth. There, about 1/4 inch behind the spot where her eye teeth were supposed to pop up were 4 tiny corners of tooth. Same thing on each side of her jaw, top and bottom. All of a sudden, the crabby mornings and begging for cold milk bottles made perfect sense. Enter first year molars. DUH? I hope this explains the weird rash, too.

Maybe by the time Nora gets her teeth, I'll have this all figured out, huh?

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