Friday, December 17, 2010

Weeks 14 and 15 - The curry incident




10/17---------------------------11/17-----------------------12/17


Hello and happy holidays! The weeks are going by super fast and I realize that this probably the longest I've gone between blog posts! I didn't think my teeth were straightening up, but when I look at the progression, I can see that they've straightened up a ton in the past month. It even looks like the gap up top has closed in a bit so yay for that!

I've read that curry can cause your powerchains / rubberbands to change colors and I can confirm this is absolutely true. Online, I read that silver was a safe choice, but some chicken vindaloo later, my pretty silver powerchains are now a shiny gold. I've actually had curry twice in the past two weeks so clearly I am a glutton for punishment. I can report that the gold color does fade with brushing so over time it's not as bright as say the night you have curry. When this happened originally, I was going to get my elastics changed, but then I figured it blended well enough with my teeth, so I decided to skip it. My next adjustment is the 29th so I'll have to see about getting a different color up top.

For those that haven't entered the braces stage yet, I've decided that in retrospect, the metal brackets are way better than the "clear" brackets. First the brackets aren't really clear, hence the quotation marks and second, they're a lot bigger than the metal brackets. Plus the dark gray elastics blend well with metal and don't stain.

Also, I've tried to cheap out on the threader floss by buying Oral B's brand and I've got to say nothing beats Crest's threader floss. The Oral B floss took twice as long to thread—not worth it when my brushing routine is already such a process.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Weeks 12 & 13


30 days-----------------------60 days-------------------------90 days
Braces timeline



Left side



Right side


It's been almost a month since I posted pictures so I wanted to get a whole bunch up today. As you can see, the gaps between my front teeth and the lateral incisors are almost closed. Yay! I have gotten over any self-consciousness I had over my teeth and now no longer use wax to hide the gaps. I officially went wax free around 11/20. It just got to the point where I didn't want to deal with it anymore and the gaps to me seem not that bad. Plus, I've had about three incidents already where I swallowed the wax. Yuk, right? So far now, the baby gaps still need to close and then maybe this front one will start closing again. In other positive developments this week I started eating sandwiches again. It seems like the front teeth are a lot more sturdy now and it's easier to bite through things.