yanked tooth, sparkly glasses

We moved to our new house about a year and a half ago.  Thank heavens.  Our old house was 600 square feet, and its only doors were on either side of the bathroom.  It could've been worse, I guess.  We could've been without those doors, too.  As it was, Todd, Marley, and I shared the same bedroom/kitchen/living room.  Marley's first room was actually a glorified closet, without a real door, and with just enough room for a crib and a small dresser.  So when we moved to a place with a little over 1200 square feet, we felt - and still do feel, sort of - as though we're roaming an expansive estate, with over five doors!  Anyhow, during one of our many, many trips to Home Depot, purchasing the fixes necessary for our fixer-upper (a trip taken later than it should have been with a two-year-old in tow), Marley raced down an aisle, chased by the "Daddy Monster" (her words, with maybe a little of my influence).  She tripped, fell, and chipped her two, cute, little front teeth.

We visited our family dentist, who filed them down a bit and told us to keep an eye on them.  Over the past year, we watched one turn a greenish-grey.  We kept watching.  Then last week Marley woke up crying, and we watched the gums above that tooth swell and discolor.  Her lip looked like a prize fighter's.  That kid practically is a prize fighter.  She's swung at me during some pretty impressive tantrums, anyway.  And if you think you'll never have a child who actually tries to strike you, then let me tell you: that's what I thought, too.  

Anyhow, after some antibiotics, the swelling went down, and after two visits to a pediatric dentist, the tooth was gone.  Yanked after a series of numbing agents, including laughing gas.  My three-year-old has inhaled laughing gas!  And the tooth fairy has come to our home about three or four years before we expected to need her services.

The tooth fairy left Marley a new set of fairy wings, and since they come from the fluttering pixie herself, this gives Marley some fairy cred.  But Marley wasn't only missing her tooth last week, she was also missing her glasses.  She took them off while I was mesmerized by coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration and she put on a pair of pink sunglasses with strawberry-shaped lenses.  And then, at some point, she sat on her actual glasses and smushed  them beyond repair.  That's why she looks so wonky in the above picture.  In fact, she got glasses about a year ago when I started noticing her wonkiness.  It wasn't a lazy eye, but it might have become one without prescriptive lenses, so it's a good thing I worried so much about it.  (Super Mom!)

So Marley's glasses were broken, she started getting headaches at the end of each day without them, and I had a ridiculously hard time finding a replacement pair without driving too far away.  My little Bean is a peanut, and Lens Crafter, for example, just doesn't carry frames in her size, and the employees I spoke to couldn't even name a place that does.  At the optometrist in town, I had a choice between just two pairs, one of which featured Sponge Bob Squarepants.  No thank you.  Anyhow, I eventually ended up at a great place just one town over where a delightful lady helped me look though catalogs so that I could order the frames that I liked in Marley's tiny size.  And this is the result:

They are purple (sugar plum, to be exact), and they are sparkly, and that is why she likes them.  When she had them on yesterday, she was also wearing several beaded necklaces: one yellow, one orange (her favorites), and one purple.  She looked like a receptionist from 1959 named Myrtle.  When I picked her up at school today, I had forgotten about them and actually did a double-take when I saw her.  Marley's cuteness factor is off the charts.  So cute, in fact, that moments ago, during her latest raging tantrum, when she stopped screaming several times to adjust her glasses, her necklaces, and the necklace she had strung around her forehead as a sort of hippie crown, I almost stopped feeling the wretched heartache that usually accompanies her wild meltdowns.  You'd think a little Myrtle would never lose her composure.  She did toss the glasses at one point, though, so maybe that explains it.