Hey, did we end up with an opened-box floor model or something?

Mmmm, cinnaminnamon toast

A had her six-month cleaning and check-up with our dentist yesterday. Her very first visit was in May and as I mentioned in a blog entry at that time, I learned then that she is defective: she's got an underbite.

At yesterday's visit, the dental hygienist was cleaning my daughter's teeth and mentioned the underbite. She gave me a knowing look and said, "You should start putting away money now for the orthodontia." She informed me that she used to work in an oral surgeon's office and that this sort of thing gets very expensive. Expensive, as in, you'll-be-living-off-Ramen-noodles-straight-into-your-golden-years expensive. "If it gets really bad, she won't even be able to bite into a sandwich," the hygienist said ominously. I had visions of my beautiful daughter developing some freakish Bulldog jaw. (In an ironic twist, I volunteer for Boxer rescue, and one of the tests to determine if a dog is a purebred Boxer is to confirm that the dog has an undershot jaw. This trait is desirable for the breed and in fact the AKC breed standard requires it. In humans, though, apparently this is not the case.)

Meanwhile, the kid was lying flat on her back with a flat-screen monitor hanging over her face. She even got to choose the flavor of toothpaste used to polish her misaligned choppers. Oh, and what does she get to watch while she gets her teeth cleaned? A Spongebob Squarepants cartoon. What do I get to watch on the monitor while I get my teeth cleaned? An x-ray of my own mouth. I've been robbed.

But, back to Little Miss Underbite. We are still paying on an adoption loan we took out when she was born. We will be making payments on it for years to come. So now it appears as though once we pay that off, we'll then start funneling our money straight into our daughter's mouth.

The dental hygienist had me believing that someday a surgeon is going to have to unhinge my daughter's child (you know, like a snake unhinges its jaw in order to swallow a cat or whatever?) and then re-align her bite and put her back together. When the dentist came in, however, he was a bit more conservative. He said we should wait until her adult teeth come in and then see where we are. It has been my experience that wrong things never fix themselves, but qui sait?

And people wonder why we have only one child.