Thursday, October 17, 2013

Run-around Thursday

It's not Randomday, but it sure feels like it.  So, I was in the middle of teaching a lesson on oddball adjectives to 8th grade this morning, and things were a bit wacky and unruly as they sometimes get when the fascination of putting inflected endings on "audax" and "celer" starts to wear off and I had inadvertently made a quip when I had translated "pueris integris" as "to the fresh boys" and then hastily corrected "to the uninjured boys, because if they got fresh they would be injured," and we were all recovering from the embarrassment of me having said that, when the classroom phone rang.  And the office tells me that Quarta broke her tooth and would be waiting in her classroom for me to come and evaluate at my earliest convenience.

Sooo... it was a molar, 2nd in from the top left, and it had split in half as she had taken a bite of pita chip.  There were two fragments out, and half of the tooth still seated in the gum.  I get pretty queasy during dental emergencies, just ask Secundus, who has had plenty.  But the pediatric dentist she sees could see her if I took her to the mall office right away, so I scrambled to give a quickly-arranged sub the information she would need to handle 7th grade (Thanks, Peggy!)  The good news is that it was a baby tooth, and came out fairly cleanly after the dentist did his thing while I studiously looked the other way and wished I had brought knitting.  The bad news, there apparently is no permanent tooth behind it.  This will mean a follow-up visit and we will see what needs to be done about orthodontics, spacers, and an eventual implant.  I keep saying, I'm hoping for the price of implants to come down to where the middle class can consider them.  Our family is going to need at about 5 in the next several years.

I took Quarta back to school (she really wanted to be there for art -- P.E., not so much) and went home for a late lunch and watched an episode of West Wing on Netflix while trying to overcome my queasy post-dental-emergency stomach.  Then it was time for the kids to come home from school.  Quarta had survived the rest of the day fine; Tertia got off her bus in tears.  Checking with the bus driver, a boy had just hit her over the head with his library book.  Well, that was a shock.  She has never been bullied before, to my knowledge, in 9 years of public school.  The bus driver witnessed it and wrote it up as a report; I emailed Tertia's teacher and assistant principal immediately and the school is dealing with it appropriately.  I can only hope the boy's parents are dealing with it as well.

In all the stress I completely forgot I needed to pick up our vegetable basket and Quarta's piano teacher for her piano lesson until 15 minutes later than I should have.  It all did happen, but I was so glad I had gone Costco shopping yesterday and had a lasagna and other elements of a pre-fab meal all ready to go.  And it is definitely an evening for blogging, putting my feet up and watching mindless TV while enjoying a Hagen-Daz salted caramel ice cream bar.  And I will be in bed by 10:00 tonight.

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