teeth

The girls usually spend one week of the summer down in Charlottesville with my family. Since I’m working from anywhere these days, I went down with them and stayed the week. We hadn’t seen everyone in-person since Sophie’s birthday back in March, so it was really nice to finally give real hugs. The week was pretty low key. Most of the activities that the girls do while down there are closed this summer, or we just weren’t comfortable doing them, so we spent a lot of time at the house and just took a couple of trips out.

One day Becky and I took the girls to Sugar Hollow, which is a beautiful hiking spot where I spent a lot of time in high school.

Another day we went to a lake that was open for swimming.

One afternoon we met up with my friend Sarah and her daughter Lexi, who is 2 weeks younger than Sophie. We typically see them once or twice a year. The girls have totally different personalities, but get along pretty well. This time they bonded over Tic Toc (if I could find an eye roll emoji I would insert it here).

Sophie & Lexi (looking at Tic Toc together). Also pictured, adorable Caleb, who is just a year.

And the rest of the time we spent at the house – playing in the yard, fishing, and just hanging out.

Sophie and Penny fishing at the lake.

Lauren lost a tooth while we were down there – her 8th tooth, and third to lose while we’re with my family. Must be a tooth fairy preferred location.

Holding up her 8th lost tooth.

We of course travel with all of the animals, which right now just included Lauren’s tortoise, Jewels, and Sophie’s parakeets, Princess and Zebra. Jewels had an opportunity to meet Vahid, and she was not thrilled about it. She kept her head in the shell the entire time.

Jewels and Vahid meet.

Lauren and Ari are pretty inseparable, and spent nearly the entire time together. At times it makes it tough for Soph because she feels left out. She and Ari also play together, but their personalities are very similar, which usually means it leads to fighting pretty quickly.

Mom also wanted to recreate a picture that she took of Dad, Becky and I about 30 years ago when we had Hannah, who is a doppelganger of Penny. Penny wasn’t super into taking direction, and we’re all a lot bigger than we were 30 years ago!

1992 vs. 2020
The whole fam on our last night there.
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About two weeks ago Sophie went back to CHOP to get her lip corrected. As you’ll recall, back in August Sophie was jumping on the bed, fell off, landed on the bedside table, and knocked her two front teeth back up into her gums, and split her lip. They stitched the lip in the emergency room, but didn’t do the best job, so we had it corrected by the plastic surgery department.

She was pretty nervous about the procedure because we had a lot of time to talk and think about it – as opposed to the last time when it was a mad dash to the ER. But she did great! She was put under and the surgery took about 30 minutes. When she woke up she had about a dozen stitches in her upper lip and it was pretty swollen.

She was a pretty sad girl when she first woke up…

But Dave took her for some ice cream right away! 

And now it’s almost back to normal. You can see that one of her front teeth came back all the way, but the other one has only partly emerged. Now that her lip isn’t so fat you can see the teeth better. But we have a few years before they both fall out and are replaced by (hopefully very straight) grown up teeth. 

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