i don’t want to turn this into all-teething-all-the-time, which of course means that i’m going to write about our continuing adventures with teething.

in my naivety, i thought that when teeth finally broke broke through the gums that we’d see the rapid disappearance of teething symptoms. yes, i can hear all you veteran parents quietly snickering from the peanut gallery. indeed that doesn’t seem to be the case, so we ran drove to our local health food store to grab some hyland teething tablets which a few people recently recommended as a teething remedy ( not that we won’t be trying the other ideas, this was just the first on our list for a variety of uninteresting reasons ).

i think the jury is still out on whether or not the tablets are going to work for us. we’ve given him two doses of three tablets about four hours apart and it’s hard to say if it helped alleviate his symptoms. then again, maybe he’d be a lot more symptomatic if we had done nothing. then again, sometimes a placebo really does work wonders so maybe it’s just a case of trial and error until you find something that works until it doesn’t and you move on erroneously attributing the whims of statistics with cause and effect.

sometimes i think my life would be a little easier if i had taken fewer math classes. but i digress.

in any case, after we had given odin his first dose of teething tablets i decided to check the ingredients:

Active Ingredients: Calcarea Phosphorica (calcium phosphate) 3x, Chamomilla (chamomile) 3x HPUS, Coffea Cruda (coffee) 3x HPUS, Belladonna 3X HPUS 0.0003% Alkaloids

belladonna? i guess if it’s the hallucinogenic nightshade that might explain odin’s behavior after taking a few of the tabs!

in all seriousness, if you do decide to try the teething tablets, make sure you follow directions and dissolve them under the patient’s tongue! if you just put them on top of the tongue, they’re likely to gag as they try to swallow the tablet before it completely dissolves. trust me on this ;-(

for the humor impaired, i feel compelled to add that his appearence in the photo was not indicative of his general demeaner – it just happened to be one of the many “unflattering” photos that i would usually delete. and i’m mostly joking about the beladonna. mostly.