Braces and Baby Steps

 Tertia and Quarta had appointments at the orthodontist today. It was Quarta's day to get bands and upper brackets put on. Tertia is now wearing rubber bands to pull her lower jaw into alignment with the upper.  She cannot put them in herself.  I can put them in, but it apparently takes 20 minutes to do it.  I'm hoping to improve that speed.

 Quarta seems a lot taller.   She is also much more verbal than Tertia, and will be sure to tell me if she's in pain.  That doesn't mean that I can do anything about it, of course.  Tertia is nearing the end of her braces adventure: she'll be wearing a retainer then, and biding her time until she can get some dental implants to fill that big gap on top.  With one family member or another, it seems like I practically live at the dentist's office these days.

It's Christmas time, and I'm not really doing anything about it.  I'm taking baby steps on the Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt... this is clue 3, a little more than halfway done.  The mystery link-up is technically for clue 4 but I'm happy to be this far along.  I really like the green and white checkerboard with bits of black.

Here's what I should be doing, but am not: cleaning the house; organizing all the new orthodontic supplies and cleaning the kids' bathroom; baking cookies with no nuts or sticky bits to get caught in braces; writing thank-you notes for all the teacher loot I received; grading and updating the SchoolSpeak database; shopping, cooking, and menu-planning; writing Christmas letters; making New Year's resolutions to be much, much more organized and productive than I have been this year.  Nope, I don't think so.  I'm finding the amount of cooking and cleaning I'm doing is therapeutic, and so is the quilting.  Not going to push it beyond that!