It's a weird thing, teething.
It can happen at any time, with little to no warning. And it's impossible to predict. You can guess, you can assume, but you won't really know until a tooth shows up. Oh but there are symptoms, you say. Sure - drooling, irritability, trouble sleeping, putting things in mouth, pulling at their ears... all symptoms.
Know what else those are symptoms of? Being a baby.
And all things that E regularly does. We've had people stop us in Target to tell us E was teething. When he was two months old.
Nice try, but no. E is now eight months old and still has no teeth. So all you people who have been telling me for months that he's teething - he's just being a baby. I'm not surprised by this, though. I've long had ten months in my head as the earliest he'll get teeth. Mostly because they just run late in our family. And partly because then I don't have to worry about it. It's a thing for later.
So when I was talking to a mom group recently about some weird things E was doing, I was shocked when immediately they all came back with "he's probably getting a tooth."
Could he? Is it possible in my haste to say he's still months away from teeth, could I have ignored a possible reason for his symptoms? (Mostly a refusal to eat firmer food that he previously loved). If so, I'm so not ready for this. A tooth would make him a real person! Right now he's still my little baby. It's also possible everyone in my group is jumping to the tooth conclusion for the same reason everyone else always does - it's easy, and it's usually true for most babies.
It's a bit humorous to look at my baby book. My mom wrote that she thought I was teething months before I cut my first tooth. I've held off until now, but I did finally write in his baby book that E might be teething. Although since I wrote that, I've completely changed my mind because he's acting pretty normal again. So I'm back to assuming it will be months before the first tooth appears..
Let's hope I didn't just jinx myself into writing a blog post next week about his first tooth!