Friday, March 18, 2011

Braces

C got her braces 3 weeks ago. At first they hurt but now they are fine. She brushes her teeth in her bottom jaw every morning and just before bedtime. I brush, clean, and brush again the teeth in her upper jaw. She chose purple and pink bands. I think she is impressed with her braces. Everyone in her class loves that she has them. She's the only girl in her class that has braces (twin boys have but boys don't count apparently) and every time she opens her mouth the other girls squeal and make a comment about the braces. C is also a drama queen deluxe so this centre of attention thing she has going is right up her alley.

J hasn't teased her at all, his bff S tried but J told him to stop. Big brother went balastic on his friend. Poor kid. He won't be teasing anyone again in a hurry.

Along with the braces, she has had to embrace a whole new way of eating :

No gassy drinks (not that we live off the stuff, she only ever drinks coke zero at the Spur a few times a year and at parties she gets invited to, which is also a few times a year).
No sweets (not even marshmallows).
No sugary treats or biscuits (gone are the rusks she likes to dunk in her morning tea sometimes and the melted marshmallows inbetween marie biscuits).
No nuts of any kind.
No droe wors.
No biltong.
No mielies.
No popcorn.
No chips.
No chewing meat off bones (my little carnivore really struggles with this one).

Everything must be cut up into bite size portions. She can't bite anything with her front teeth for the next 9 months.

Her school lunches went from sandwiches with ham, or peanut butter or wraps with chunks of chicken strips to sandwiches with marmite and cheese or a thin spread of smooth peanut butter cut into tiny pieces, fruit cut up into small pieces, cooked carrots diced or grated fresh, sweetcorn mixed with bits of ham. She meticulously checks the lables on all food products to see if it contains any sugar. If it does, she doesn't eat it. Yesterday I treated J and his friend S to cheese rolls with strawberry jam, a coke in a glass bottle (gotta love the old fashioned bottles) and a 7Up. C had a slice of brown bread cut into 11tybillion pieces with some butter and a thin layer of strawberry jam and a bottle of water.

Breakfast is ok now. She loves Special K but hates it warm so we switched to oatmeal with vanilla, green food colouring and a bit of butter with milk. Dinners have become times to really experiment with food. Last night I made mini meatball curry with sweet potatoes and carrots. She ate more vegetables than meat, even though the meatballs were small enough to cut in half and put in her mouth. She's eating more healthy now than she ever did before (tomatoes are still a huge no no though but we are working on that one).

She is living for the day 6 months from now when the orthodontist takes those braces off. She's started a list of all the things she is going to eat on that day.

Friday, March 11, 2011

Imaginary friends

J has a classmate who has a girlfriend. An imaginary girlfriend. He's kissed her, they've broken up, he likes her. He misses her. J thinks it's weird that his classmate has an imaginary friend. And that she's a girl. See, girls are horrible creatures. They are not worthy of a boy's time. They exist solely to plague boys (of course it doesn't help that his nemesis is a girl, and that she teases him all the time). (Secretly I am so frigging stoked he still thinks this way about girls! But I digress.) What has J so freaked about this imaginary friend is that his classmate talks about her all.the.time. Like, get into trouble talk which gets you sent to the Headmaster's office. Yes, he spoke so much about this imaginary girlfriend yesterday that he ended up disrupting the class and was sent off to have a chat with the Headmaster. Poor kid.

In my day, imaginary friends were friends who always got the blame for putting socks on the cat's paws, or eating the last of the jelly and custard, or who wrote on the wall, or who busted your bike because they told you to try and stand on the seat while going at warp speed down a gravel road. Downhill. With no brakes.