Tooth: A Tale of Joy and Sadness

Today, one kid went to secondary school, three kids went to primary school, one husband went to work, two parents are in the jungle of Borneo watching orangutang and fireflies, the dog is back on the couch after his ‘special time’ with Rich The Amazing Dog Sitter, and the baby has been eating honey straight from the squeezable jar. All back to normal then, and not a moment too soon.

We spent a few weeks in Northern Cyprus with my mum and dad in a villa surrounded by mountains and starving cats who broke in and stole our food and feral dogs that ate my father’s shoes. Cyprus was hot in a way that felt scary, the heat a skulking predator just waiting to burn you up and turn you limp and lifeless and useless for anything but lying down and whinging a bit. It burned our skin badly, pretty much on day one, mostly because I forgot how the sun is supposed to function. The kids got shoulder blisters and new freckles and yellowy tans with intermittent heat rashes. I got some sort of nipple-sized yellow blister from an unidentified insect bite right in the middle of my reddish wizened chest and big teenage spots from the sunscreen. Ned got a smashed head from falling onto a rock, while Otis bashed his wonky tooth (again) on a porcelain plate and Noah broke his massive front adult tooth in half while climbing up into a waterslide on a two-storied gulet. Snapped off so close to the pulp, in fact, that it makes you feel a bit nauseous just to look at it.

Snapping Your Adult Tooth In Half – The Easy Way

We were on a boat trip around the bays of Kyrenia and we had all our teeth intact – always a good starting point:

The captain had stopped at a bay for a swim and cranked up the waterslide for the kids. It  started at the top story of the boat and ended up at the bottom, spewing kids out into the sea with a mighty watery propulsion. The kids lined up and took turns whooshing down the slide into the Med, swimming back around to the ladder, climbing up to the top story of the boat and doing it all over again. Later, when everyone was done, the captain turned off the water, closed the slide with a plastic lid and the kids swam and jumped off the boat. Another boat pulled up and started a weird, raving foam party which sent everyone arse over tit.

A while later we hear screaming and peer out into the water to see three of my kids paddling to the ladder, ranting about Noah and his teeth. Noah was swimming along desperately behind, with blood all over his face and a big horrified rictus grin, his tooth snapped in half like some sort of bad joke.

Once they stopped screaming, they told us that they had all been climbing up inside the waterslide and sliding down it on some sort of idiot boyish renegade mission until some water got flushed through the slide which pushed Noah onto his face with enough force to break his tooth and smash his mouth up. Once the bleeding stopped the captain upped anchor and drove us around to another bay while Noah sat there with his head in his hands, refusing even overpriced ice cream, such was his tooth-related despair and general discomfort. It was really horrible and typically embarrassing.

Then The Miracle Happened

At the next bay, Mark went snorkelling and dived beneath the boat and found the half tooth at the bottom of the sea. I’ll let that sink in:

AT THE NEXT BAY!

Like some sort of unfeasible tooth reunion miracle. It was a mystery, until we figured out that the tooth was probably caught up in the slide and was spat out into the next bay where Mark found it. It seemed to be a perfect fit when placed next to the wounded remaining tooth shard. So it was very precious, because we thought it might be able to be reattached and it was, in any case, a Miracle Sea Tooth and needed to be put into a safe place. So mum says

“Lets put it in my pill box – it’ll be safe there!”

And so we did.

Then the Tragedy Happened

The following morning, my mother opened up her pill box and there was nothing inside. She couldn’t remember if she had eaten the four pills and the tooth shard, or whether Otis might have eaten the four pills and the tooth shard, or even if the starving cats had used their cat-hands to prise open the box and eat the pills and the tooth shard, but WHATEVER, the tooth shard (and the pills) were GONE. The Miracle Tooth Shard was miraculously given, and then taketh awayth again. As were the pills, though no one – not the cats, Mum or Otis, seemed to suffer any side-effects.

And now Noah has some off-colour filling which will fall out repeatedly, so I am told, until he is a man, and then he will need root canal situations.

Here is North Cyprus and Ruins and Things

The villa pool overlooked by Five Finger Mountain:

Bellapais Abbey:

Dirty faces:

Famagusta old town with mum and dad lookin’ fine (though hot):

Cistern:

The ruins at Salamis:

Kyrenia market:

Alagadi beach rockpool situation:

Icons at St Barnabas Church:

Beachside churchy-cave:

A small boy in bloomers:

Til next year, then.