Small Boy Has An Eventful Weekend

Sounds like an Enid Blyton book, but it wasn't all quite as lovely as that, I'm afraid.

On Saturday, Granny & I took small boy for a walk along by the river (Thames); we had lots of fun kicking a football, running about and picking up twigs and when small boy tired of such fun, we bundled him in his pram and walked along to the park. Once there small boy got very excited and insisted on going on the bigger slide, not the baby one he is usually hearded towards by me. Still, he's just a day short of being two, I thought to myself, and he really is quite adept at climbing the steps and hurling himself down the slide, so I let him carry on. Uh-oh. What a mistake that turned out to be as, on his third (or was it fourth?) slippy-slide down, he came down feet first on his tummy (if you can picture that), landed with a thump at the bottom and smacked his face right on the end of the slide. ***shudder***

My first thought as I rushed to gather him up (apart from 'why did I let him go down the slide that way round?') was ''Oh god, he's broken his nose' so I was actually pleasantly surprised (if it's possible for anything to be pleasant in such circumstances) to see just a small amount of blood on his bottom lip. Then it dawned on me, as we mopped up the blood and tears that there was actually a large amount of one of his front teeth missing. Bugger.

I was straight on the phone to the emergency dentist who advised taking small boy to A&E first because of his age. So Granny and I hot-footed it home with a not-particularly worried small child who was busy sitting in his pram drinking milk, bundled ourselves in the car and drove the 10mins to the hospital. After being assessed by the triage nurse we then spent the next hour with small boy running around, chattering, eating and generally bouncing off the walls in a "look at me, I'm perfectly well, what on earth is my over-protective mother doing here with me wasting the doctors' time while there are some properly poorly people waiting to be seen" kind of fashion. Five minutes with the doctor who advised taking small boy to our regular dentist and handed over a tube of antibiotic cream (meant for conjunctivitis, according to the leaflet...) for the small cut on his lip (about which said doctor was "not overly concerned") and we were back outside in the spring sunshine with a small boy who just wanted to go home and have his lunchtime nap.

As it happens, small boy's tooth really is in a bad way, but he is showing no signs of discomfort and is eating and drinking normally, and behaving in his normal boisterous manner, thank goodness. We went to the dentist today and have to go back again on Thursday. There was much talk of "pulp", "anaesthetists", "not something that can be done on the NHS", "concern for adult tooth", etc, etc. It doesn't sound good, but at least he seems unfazed and isn't in any pain. At the moment...