This is another one of those privileges of being a grandparent that I wrote about in an earlier post.  Anyone who knows me well enough has probably heard me repeating myself like a broken record that the taste for sweetness is a learned response.  Babies don’t crave sweet things until their tastebuds are trained to take it.  Because of this, I have been guarding Gavin’s mouth like a hawk to make sure that nothing goes in that will cultivate unhealthy eating habits becuase I don’t want to have to deal with an infant who will only eat junk food.  Neither do I want to end up like the parents my paedodontic lecturer once told me about when I was studying dentistry back in University. 

My lecturer was not a particularly pleasant man and he would be rather scornful as he recounted how parents would come to him crying over the rotting black stumps for teeth that were in the mouths of their children.  These children would end up having mouthfuls of crowns (if they were lucky) or full dentures (if they weren’t) because the abscesses in their mouths required such drastic treatment.  Because the treatment was so drastic, they would have to go under a general anaesthetic for treatment.  The children who had to have full dentures were because they weren’t old enough for their adult teeth to erupt.

If you think I’m trying to scare you, well, I am.  But the scenario I’ve painted is very real if you don’t take care of your child’s teeth.  A lot of parents have this misconception that baby teeth aren’t important and often don’t see the need to take their children to the dentist.  After all, the teeth are going to fall out eventually and the adult teeth will come into place, right?  Yes, that’s true, to an extent.  Each adult tooth has a designated time when it is ready to erupt into the mouth.  If a baby tooth is lost before the adult tooth is ready, there will be a gap present until the time the adult tooth is scheduled to erupt.  So until the adult tooth is ready, that baby tooth serves as a place holder for that adult tooth.

I digress - this wasn’t supposed to be a lecture about teeth.  It’s a post about ice cream.  So how on earth did Gavin get his first taste of ice cream since I’m so anal about keeping him off the junk food? 

I think it is the grandparents’ want in life to spoil their grandchildren.  This fact is as eternal as the rising sun and no parent can escape it.  Last Sunday, the hubby and I went for dinner with my MIL and FIL.  As usual, I was the last to finish dinner because I would be occupied with feeding Gavin.  And as usual, Gavin would fuss to be out of the chair before I would be done with dinner and his grandparents would kindly take him for a walk while I finished my dinner.  When asked whether they wanted dessert, my MIL and FIL declined. 

After we had paid for the bill, the hubby and I went to look for the three of them and we spotted them huddled outside Baskin Robbins looking highly suspicious.  When they spotted us approaching, I swear they looked as guilty as a kid caught with his hand in a cookie jar.  Although my FIL pretended that he was feeding ice cream to my MIL who had her arms full carrying Gavin, both the hubby and I knew better.  Gavin’s tastebuds were no longer innocent to the taste of ice cream.  I guess I can only be grateful that they stuck to plain vanilla ice cream.

Below: Gavin with Ah Mah and Ah Kong during Ah Kong’s birthday.

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