Our children were destined to need braces. Both Craig and I had braces when we were teenagers.

In April 2018, Rachel started her orthodontics journey. The estimated time for her treatment was one year. She had a bit of crowding that needed to be fixed and a little bit of an overbite. Dr. Bozek put on Rachel’s braces on April 18th and the current estimation is May 2019 to have them removed. Seems like just yesterday she was losing her first tooth!

Lauren was told that she needed to wait a year; she had to lose the rest of her baby teeth. In November, Lauren lost her last tooth. We called Dr. Bozek and set up an appointment. 

March 11th, the day after Lauren’s 12th birthday, we met with Dr. Bozek again. They took new x-rays and photos. They came up with a plan.

The plan.

Lauren’s treatment plan is going to take 2 years. Her little mouth has so much going on in there. 

The teeth on the top need the most treatment. The molars need to be moved outward. This allows more space to move the teeth at the front so that they are straight.

You can see the top molars on the right side are inside the molars on the bottom.

To move the molars outwards, they will be installing a pallet expander. 

But before they can do that, they had to put in spacers. These do exactly what they sound like they do. They create space between the molars. They need this space to put bands around her teeth that hold the expander.

Step 1: Spacers

Yesterday was the first step in her orthodontics journey. Lauren was nervous, but she climbed into the chair. She was in the middle chair and she carefully watched the two girls in the chairs beside her: one was getting fitted for her retainer and the other was getting a mould. Lauren was going to have to do this as well.

She said the mould material tasted like marshmallows and that it wasn’t that bad.

With Lauren’s dental history (6 cavities when she was only 6), I wasn’t surprised when the ortho technician told me that she flinched a little when she went to put the spacer in. Lauren is very hesitant when to comes to any dental stuff as she’s worried that it will hurt like getting cavities filled.

In the end, they were done and she was excited that they were turquoise. (I’ll post again about why.)