Bearing grudges

It is quite ridiculous for me to be so resentful about something that happened almost two hundred years ago. But although I know that Jane Austen loved her sister Cassandra probably more than anyone else in her life, I still nurse a furious resentment towards Cassandra for burning many of Jane's letters after her death (by some estimates Jane wrote over 3,000 letters over the course of her life, but only 160 or so remain). And the ones she kept, she censored. Even if it was what Jane wanted her to do.

This is fun

Elisa Strauss of Confetti Cakes takes four days to make a cake shaped in the image of her father's labradoodle.

As if I didn't have enough troubles feeding my family

Fiona got braces on her teeth yesterday.

Yeah, yeah, they hurt, but we expected that. What we didn't clearly understand beforehand, however, frankly, is much more serious.

Except for her two front upper teeth and two front lower teeth, her teeth literally do not meet anywhere in her jaw. The line of her upper teeth curves up from the front teeth, and so up until now, she's been chewing by drastically overbiting. The brackets on her teeth now keep her from doing that; in fact, there are stop-guards ("turbos") on the upper two front teeth that prevent it.

What this means is that she can't use her molars at all. She can't chew her food. My goodness, how the hell is she supposed to eat anything?

And, of course, Fiona being Fiona, some of the obvious alternatives are off the table. She won't eat eggs. She won't eat oatmeal. She won't eat cream of wheat. She won't eat mashed potatoes. And, being that Rob has been too busy to go to the grocery store for the past week, there is no bread in the house. Her dinner tonight consisted of rice and a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese.

She's been eating soup. But that's going to get really old, really fast.

She leaves Saturday on a servant trip with our old church and will be gone for a week. So for a week, it won't be my problem. But when she comes back . . . argh.

She's going to have them on for about a year and a half. I wonder how long it will be before she can use her molars again.

Edited to add: We sent an email off to the orthodontist, who replied as follows:

All of the things Fiona is experiencing is to be expected. The first couple of days to a week are going to be the toughest to get through. The teeth are moving so it's similar to when you workout, the next day or so your muscles are very sore and tired, the same is happening with the ligaments and tissues that surround the teeth that are moving. The bite turbos are placed to allow the lower teeth to move, if they weren't on she would be hitting the braces and potentially have many loose brackets. It is normal that her back teeth do not hit right now; each day it will get easier and easier to eat, as the bite begins to adjust and align. Even if the turbos were not on, when she would eat her back teeth would not hit because they would hit the lower braces. Tylenol works great to ease any discomfort she may be experiencing. Also, if she eats/drinks cold things that will help relax the wires and ease some of her discomfort.