Another random childhood memory inspired by a recent family event:

My son had a root canal on one of his upper incisors on Friday. (Back in the spring, a baseball glanced off the tip of his glove and hit the tooth.)

I was amazed: I expected him to have a swollen mouth, packed with cotton swabs, and to hear him moaning in pain when I came home. Instead he talked with excitement about the procedure, and how weird it was to have a numb nose and lips for a while, and how he was so nauseous on the ride home that he.... ("That's enough! Please don't talk about that at the dinner table!")

The worst oral surgery I've ever had was a surgical removal of a wisdom tooth, but when I was about my son's age, or younger, I had to get an "appliance" to correct a crossbite. (Didn't work -- I still had to have braces a few years later.) There was some metal thing that sat in the roof of my mouth and it was supposed to shift several crowded teeth around. They used novacaine on me and maybe laughing gas, too.

The office of Dr. Smith, the dentist, was in the Warren Building, along with several other doctors we saw. Often after a doctor's visit in that part of town, we'd stop by the little dairy stand / burger place on 61st just west of Sheridan. (The building is a Goldie's now; it had another name when I was a kid.) After my appliance was installed, Mom bought me a root beer float there as a treat. I tried to drink it, but with my mouth so numb it was just too strange.

After other doctor visits we would go to the playground at LaFortune Park. I remember my sister and me playing there wearing our post-eye-dilation paper sunglasses, following a visit to Dr. Carroll the ophthalmologist.

One other piece of mouth-related family news: The baby is now making motorboat noises. Not just a raspberry, this is a sustained and vocalized lip-flapping noise, with pitch rising and falling. When he pauses, big brother can start the motorboat up again by blowing in his face. He still doesn't have any teeth yet, but as much as he's drooling, it shouldn't be long now. Meanwhile, big sister is reporting that her two front teeth are very loose; she may not be able to withth uth Merry Chrithmath thith year.