Lost tooth!

Trey finally lost his first tooth. It has been loose for a couple of weeks and Monday night he asked Carson to pull it out. He was super excited to show it off at school because most of his friends have already lost a few teeth.

Becks had to show off his teeth too (I remember the same picture of my little sister when I lost my first tooth!)

We had a combined party for Caeden's first and Beckham's third birthdays with the Ponds on Sunday. They were all so happy and Trey was mature enough to support his brothers without trying to steal the show (they do grow up!) - he even made a birthday boy sign to put on Beckham's chair. Beckham wanted a pirate theme so I made a treasure map cake and Trey decorated it with swedish fish in the water, sour patch kids on land and X-marks the spot.

How old are you, Becks?

Caeden looks like white trash in his undershirt but I couldn't find his bib.

His big brothers gave him some cake for breakfast the next morning (what a mess!)

Sweet Vindication

I know that you can't please everybody, but as a dentist whenever someone is left feeling like they didn't get what they expected it bothers me. A year ago I had a patient that was young and in braces. They came to me with pain that I diagnosed as needing a root canal and gave them a referral. A few days later we got a call from the mother who was mad and said that the endodontist (root canal specialist) said that the pain was just from her braces "and that any stupid dentist would know that." I knew the mother had probably added in a little to what the endodontist had said, but still that stung pretty badly. I obviously felt pretty confident in my diagnosis and the family kept coming to me. I worked on both the mother and father still and solved a couple big problems for them, but the daughter didn't want to see me....until today.

I was the only doctor in the office and she had pain again in that same tooth, so she had to see me. We took an xray and had definitive proof that there was an abscess and the tooth would need a root canal (large PARL for the dental nerds). She hasn't had braces for a year so that obviously isn't the source of the pain. The mom got real mad again, thankfully this time not at me! She said, "You were right the whole time and that other doctor was wrong!" She kept thanking me for doing such a good job. I was just glad to have my biggest dental negative now be a positive!

Kids

I was looking at the past few posts and realized we haven't been posting pix of the kids, and since I know you all want to see those more than a hamburger or a pic of the bathroom, here you go:

This is how Caeden spent his first birthday (January 9th). The poor kid was so sick that he actually watched a movie with Becks for once, and fell asleep on the couch. I love the look on his face in the first picture:

The boys can't stay inside all the time, even when it's freezing outside! I love this pic of Trey on the swing.

I got the kids some foam letter stickers to help them learn letters (Becks) and spelling/sounding out (Trey) and they definitely had fun with them but of course I wound up finding them stuck to the floors, walls, furniture, etc.

I guess I need to pull out the camera more, that's all we have!

Bid'nus

As many of you know I have been waiting to start my own dental practice for almost 2 years now. I believe that many are starting to think that I am crying wolf because I keep saying, "It should happen in about 6-7 months." That is what I keep getting told by my landlord. He isn't being deceptive, he is going off of standard permitting and construction time lines. The city has been the problem. The planning department keeps delaying things extensively and throwing up road blocks. Last Monday there was a meeting with the city council and the landlord had his attorney come. I went to see what happened and was very happy with the results.

The attorney said that he has had over 30 years experience working with development companies and the time it has taken to get to this point in the construction process has been 3-4 times greater than normal. He understands there are delays that can happen anywhere, but to be 3-4x more than usual "...is absurd." The city council is not at fault at all for the delays, but now that they know about its magnitude and the subsequent legal action (see below) they can move in to override the planning department and makes things happen.

So, the legal action...in 2006 the state of Washington enacted a law that (as far as I could get as the lawyer was talking to the council) municipal governments could be audited by the state if there were signs that warranted such action. This new law was going to be enforced on the planning department because there is strong evidence of practices to increase construction fee revenue by various things such as re-permitting and order changes. There will be a meeting in a couple weeks on this issue. Hopefully to alleviate the situation the council will jump in and override the current problem (not changing a plan for manhole placement) that could add on another 2-3 months to the development process.

All in all, it has been very frustrating and is causing a negative image for the city and its relationship with business owners. The council sees this and they want to correct that problem. I wish this could have happened a year ago so that I could have a year's worth of practice growth under my belt right now. The silver lining on this dark cloud is that I have been able to spend more time developing my systems that I want to have in place with my front office, clinical staff, etc so that I can start off running....even if that doesn't happen for another year.

For Sale

We finally finished the tile in our master bath...just in time to sell our home. This isn't a good picture, but it is hard to capture without being here. I took two days off of work and spent every spare second this past two weeks getting ready to put our home on the market. It officially was listed on the MLS this past Friday and now at 11:02 on Sunday night we finished organizing the garage. We are finally done with all the large things. We still have tons of little things like touch up paint to get good lines, steam clean the carpets, etc, but at least we are all done with the tile, painting, hanging pictures back up, etc so that we can show the house and not have any big eye sores.

Dine in or out?

Since high school I have wondered how eating out (cheaply) compares to a good home cooked meal. Once in dental school I had a buddy say that eating a whopper combo was "way cheaper" than anything you could cook at home. I was doubtful, but never did the exercise of calculating it all out. After being bugged by this question in the back of my mind for years I wanted to put it to rest. So, I took the stupidly, painstaking time to figure out what a spaghetti dinner would cost per person to eat. This if course doesn't calculate negative things like cook time or clean time or positives like nutrition value that you have much more of when cooking at home. Here are my calculations:


Spaghetti dinner
spaghetti sauce prego 26 oz $2.50 (1/6) = $ 0.42
noodles 16 0z $1 (1/6) = $ 0.17
frozen peas 32 oz $2.70 (1/10) = $ 0.27
milk 2% 1 gallon $2.70 (1/8 gallon) = $ 0.34
ground beef 96% fat free 1 lb (1/6) = $ 0.83
Salad 11oz $3.69 (1/2) = $ 1.85
Salad dressing $2.29 (1/16) = $ 0.14
salt/pepper $1.29 (1/75 to 1/100) = $ 0.01
Parmesan $5.00 (1/45 to 1/35) = $ 0.14

Total per person = $4.17 w/ meat, $3.34 w/o meat.
[from Safeway.com, all non-organic, all Safeway brand when possible, serving size from container]

So, it comes out cheaper and healthier to eat at home. You could even the score by just ordering off the dollar menu, but that increases the health disparities even more. BTW, back in college, my roommate and I set a goal to eat for $1/meal ($22/week) and we pretty much did it every time.

We will rock you!

For New Year's Eve we went to a sleepover at the Chapman's house. We played Guitar Hero and DDR all night with lots of treats and candy. It was a lot of fun.



We didn't know that we had such rockers for boys. They loved it, and Trey did very well.