To My Sons After 2 Weeks of Teething Hell

Dear Miles and Emmett,

You are now 42 weeks and 6 days old — almost 10 months since you came out of my belly. These last two weeks, I have wanted to shrink you and put you back in. Between the two of you, you’ve cut or are still cutting nine teeth. Nine. There has been a lot of screaming. There had been very little sleeping.

We’ve dosed you with Tylenol and Advil, rubbed teething gel on your gums, gone through about 200 Hyland’s teething tablets, made sure your amber teething necklaces were on at all times, given you frozen things to chew on, and rocked you endlessly. And nothing seemed to help you feel better. It was horrible. It was like the first 6 weeks after we came home from the hospital and we had no idea what you wanted or how to make you feel better — except this time we knew exactly what the problem was: You were in pain and there was nothing we could do about it.

But as bad as it was for Daddy and me — and trust me, it was rough — it was so much worse for you. How are you supposed to understand teeth erupting through your gums? How are you supposed to know what is happening to your mouth, why everything hurts, why there are suddenly sharp, pointy things where before there was only soft, smooth flesh? And how are you supposed to know that it will end?

No wonder you didn’t want to eat. No wonder you couldn’t sleep. No wonder you just wanted to be held. You just hurt. And we ached for you.

Yet despite the fact that you basically screamed instead of sleeping for two weeks and we thought we might all die of sleep deprivation before the final tooth broke through, you somehow managed to get even cuter, even sweeter, even more lovable. You still squealed with joy when I popped into your room in the middle of the day. You still snuggled into my neck when I picked you up. You still clapped and laughed and giggled. You still bounced like crazy while we played.

I don’t know how you managed to be pleasant at all. “Pleasant” was definitely a chore for me, that’s for sure. It must be genetically programmed that when babies are at their most intolerable their level of adorableness undergoes a corresponding increase so their parents don’t kill them — or themselves. Every times we reached a new breaking point, you did something amazing. Miles, you popped up in your crib and said, “Hi, Dada!” when Daddy came in to relieve me during a particularly challenging nap attempt. Emmett, you started crawling frantically toward me with the biggest drooly grin and pulling yourself up for a hug every time I thought I couldn’t get away from you soon enough.

Somehow, we all loved each other through teething hell, and somehow as we reach the other side, it doesn’t seem like it was that bad. Which is good, I guess, because you have a lot more teeth to go.

But in the scheme of things, a couple of days of screaming is nothing. It’s a blip on the radar, a cloud in an otherwise sunny existence. And that’s how all the hard stuff has been with you guys. The hard stuff is awful, but the rest if the time is so amazing that I don’t even care. You are worth it — every eardrum-shattering, up-all-night, oh-my-god-when-will-it-end moment of it.

And if it would mean that you’d stay babies longer, I’d go through it again a dozen times over. I love you.

Love,
Mommy