Thursday, October 24, 2013

Dentist

Hi  ho, hi ho. It's off to the dentist we go! The kids all go to Children's Dental Center in Sioux Falls. The three girls have their appointment at 10am and the three boys have their appointment at 12:40pm so it's an all day trip. There's been a slight change to the plan since Brittney decided she can't go today. If she's not in school today, she can't practice after school with her cheer team. If she doesn't practice today, the last practice before they leave for the state meet tomorrow, then she isn't allowed to compete. So I cancelled her dentist appointment and rescheduled it. Since we then had an extra seat in the van, my wonderful mom rode along with us!
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I didn't get this posted before I ran out the door this morning. I was meeting with Kristen from the National Children's study this morning before 8am at our house and then I ran out the door with the kids to make it to the dentist on time.

The dentist trip went surprisingly well and none of the five kids I took today have any cavities or teeth issues :)

I can barely remember the trip to the dentist with five kids a few months after the boys came to live with us. Brittney was 8, Riley was 5, Taylor was 4, Zeke was 4 and Anthony was 2. Zeke had just learned to use a walker, was still in diapers and could hardly talk. Anthony was chaos, touching everything and everyone. Riley was used to acting any way he wanted to. They were all yelling, jumping on chairs, wanting my attention, throwing toys and books and just generally disturbing the peace. Taylor just jumped right into the throws of the chaos and Brittney was just embarrassed. I hadn't had the boys long enough to be able to connect with them verbally. I could ask them not to jump on chairs or settle down until I was blue in the face but they wouldn't really listen to anything I said. As soon as I would try to deal with one child, there would be an issue with another child or two or three. I barely remember it, other than it was awful, but I'm pretty sure I had little David with me that day too. I think he was almost one year old then.

I remember thinking how everyone was looking at us, seeing my kids bad behavior and thinking that a better parent wouldn't have kids that behaved that way. I wanted a shirt that said, "It's not my fault. I just got them." I can honestly say that I'm mostly past what other people think and can concentrate on what my children need. If I would've been smarter back then, I would've realized that it was setting my kids (and myself) up for failure to try to take them all to the dentist on the same day. They had no idea what was expected of them, they hadn't had any practice 'behaving' in public and they were extremely stressed out and disregulated just by being in a new strange new environment. I later learned (not soon enough) that I needed to take each child individually into new situations and gently teach them and help them so they weren't so stressed. Or we just stayed home. That applied to almost everything, including shopping, haircuts, eating in a restaurant, doctor visits, dental checkups, etc. It was a scheduling nightmare but after quite a few years, it's paid off! I can now take five kids to the dentist and we even went out to eat in between appointments :)
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