responsibility

Ada has hated brushing her teeth since we introduced the concept. She loves sucking the toothpaste off of the brush, and sometimes she even will take her toothbrush and brush her face with it. But putting it in her mouth and pushing the brush with some sort of force to her teeth is a concept she has fought with such vigor and flailing arms that it often took both Elliot and I to get those darn teeth cleaned - one to hold down the arms and another to pry open the mouth and force the brush into her tiny little mouth. I'm sure she'll have flashbacks in her 30s replaying the torture that her parents once inflicted upon her.

Well, as with all things Ada, she has suddenly changed her mind. This week I tried something new, after winding down for bed and reading a story, but before we take our stroll around the house to say goodnight to everything we stop in the bathroom to brush her teeth. It started out with a little struggling and a lot of "I do it", but in the end she gave in to letting Mommy do it first and then letting her take her turn sucking the toothpaste out and brushing the minty saliva all over her face. I was happy with this and would have been very pleasantly pleased if this development had lasted. So imagine my reaction last night when we made our stop in the bathroom. We walked into the room, I told Ada to get ready to get her teeth brushed, and turned away to apply the toothpaste to the toothbrush. When I turned around there she was, big eyes staring up at me, hands at her sides, and mouth WIDE open patiently waiting for me to scrub away at her teeth. She let me get all the way in to get the back molars, smiled big and brought her front teeth together so I could get the front teeth all together, stuck out her tongue so I could scrub that a little and then opened up WIDE again so I could get the roof of her mouth. And that is when it hit me, she was laughing. Laughing and squirming and smiling through the open mouth and the minty froth. That is when I realized that just like her mama, the roof of Ada's mouth is ticklish. Unlike her mama, Ada LOVES to be tickled. So even if it meant that she had to endure teeth scrubbing to get to the tickling, she would do it. She would even greet that excruciating experience with open arms (or mouth), if it meant that she would eventually get to the tickling part of the process. I now need to figure out how to integrate tickling into vegetable eating and I'll have finally conquered Ada's last great hold out.