Brace Yourself

A month ago, two days after we returned from our Tallahassee trip, Jack got braces.  When Cat got braces, we showed up, they put the braces on, and we left.  It was easy and pretty quick.  It was a different story with Jack - I spent over 3 hours at the orthodontist's office in 2 different visits that day.  

Things started out normal enough, we took a pre-braces picture outside, got checked in, and went to the chair where Jack will get his braces on.  But I knew right away it was going to be tricky.  Our dentist/orthodontist had just moved to a new office and the TV screens that were mounted above every chair in the old office hadn't all been installed yet.  The ability to watch a show or movie has made a world of difference when it comes to his dental care, and I was afraid we would be in for a loooong appointment.

Luckily, I had my wireless earbuds with me.  So, I played "Freelancers" on YouTube and Jack listened, which helped.  But he was still agitated.  The orthodontist decided to try to adhere the brackets using a different method that he thought would be more tolerable for Jack, and it seemed to work, but before we left the office, two brackets had come loose.  So we walked back in and sat down to get those fixed.  This is what Jack looked like when we left (after about 2.5 hours):

The orthodontist office is about a mile from Jack's school.  By the time we drove through McDonald's for a milkshake and got to the school, three more brackets had come loose.  He called me from school to tell me that more were loose.  We went back to the orthodontist's office right after school, this time using a chair with a TV (hooray!) and found that 4 upper brackets had come off, and all of the lower brackets except 1 had come loose.  They decided to fix the upper brackets, and just remove the lower brackets completely.  So this is what Jack looked like at dinner time:

He had no problem eating Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner, but said the canned green beans were too hard, haha.  He really didn't have much trouble with soreness, which was great, especially since he had to go back the next week to get the bottom braces put on.  We didn't have any more loose bracket issues for a few weeks, so that was nice!