I've really struggled to brush Ava's teeth. It has been one of the biggest challenges of the day and Ava used to rue when the time came for her to get ready for the brushing of the teeth. She loves the tubby, reading and bed time snacks, but brushing her teeth is the one thorn in her paw.
Sometimes, I let her do it. However, her idea of brushing one's teeth is to eat the toothpaste, so she doesn't do a bang up job. I try to talk her into it, but she closes her mouth, fights it, and results in me holding her down with a lot of kicking and screaming. Kind of how my middle schoolers are sometimes forced to do homework.
Recently, I had a breakthrough on the tooth brushing fiasco. It never occurred to me to do this earlier, but I decided to try modelling how to brush my teeth and try to entice her to replicate it. I took my toothbrush and showed how to brush first the top, bottoms, front and back of my teeth. You know what? She loved it. She spent more time on brushing and was receptive if I even had to do a little extra brushing on my own because she didn't do a thorough job.
One little victory on the road to early childhood.
