Dental Obedience

Dutch had a checkup today. After bashing out a front tooth last spring, she's supposed to go in for a checkup every 6 months. Our budget doesn't allow for such hyper-vigilance, so we figured every 11 months would do the trick. She also got her first cleaning, and we discovered that her new obsessive dental hygiene diligence (more about that later) actually involves pretty good technique. She hated the whole checkup and cleaning process, and I had one of my at-least-weekly conflicts about What I'm Teaching Her: Is It Really The Right Thing. She moaned and whimpered and whined and finally started to cry in earnest while the dentist probed and polished, but she still did what he instructed her to do, even as the tears coursed down her cheeks and dripped off her ears. I was proud of her for fighting her fear, and glad that she managed to get through something that I think is reasonably important, but some part of me wanted her to bite the dentist's finger, leap off the chair, and run out of the room.