New Mummy blog: Teething time is upon us!

Angry red cheeks, an upset tummy, nasty nappy rash, trying to chew whatever she can get her mouth around from a solid wooden table top to her entire fist, and so much dribble her chin has turned red raw. Despite the fact there’s no hint yet of a pearly white breaking through, there’s no doubt about it; Honor is teething.

She’s actually been displaying all the classic symptoms for a month or so already, as too have most of her little friends. But it’s unusual to see milk teeth coming through until around six months, and it takes until around the second birthday to get the complete set, so although the signs have been getting more and more bothersome for Honor, it looks like we’ve got a long way to go.

It’s misery for her – she doesn’t understand what hurts or why, she just knows that it’s sore when she feeds, sore when she doesn’t and especially sore when she tries to sleep.

It’s like a design flaw in the otherwise remarkably clever blueprint of the mini human being – if they were born with teeth then they would be spared this pain and suffering.

Actually, maybe not. I cannot imagine being quite so keen to breastfeed if Honor had been born with a full set of gnashers. It seems evolution’s not quite so dumb after all.

Luckily it’s a problem all babies go through – lucky for me, at least, as it means there is no shortage of advice on how to deal with it. Of course there’s good old Calpol, which works wonders when Honor is really suffering but isn’t really a solution when night after night (and day after day) the relentless descent of teeth angers her gums.

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There are homeopathic teething granules – which didn’t work for us and just made Honor sick, but most of my friends swear by them for their babies – and teething gels, which do work a treat for us. Perhaps it’s just that, after a diet of nothing but milk for five months, the slightly menthol-like flavour of the gel is a welcome change – it sends Honor cross-eyed with delight when we rub it on her gums.

We have a multitude of teething toys – wooden ones, plastic ones, gel-filled ones that can be chilled in the fridge, and of course a Sophie the Giraffe, the teething toy of choice right now, certainly if Honor is anything to go by.

Then there are the more traditional remedies, like amber teething necklaces or a cold flannel to chew – neither of which we’ve tried (yet).

But for us, the biggest problem is the nappy rash. It got so bad, and her skin was so red raw, that we had to take her to the doctor. I barely had to say the words’ nappy rash’ before he guessed that teething was to blame. There is no real medical link between teething and nappy rash, and he admitted that he never used to believe the latter was often as a result of the former – until he had his own children and experienced it first hand.

With Honor, her teething manifests itself in three, four, or five dirty nappies through the day, and then at least another one at night. No matter how often we change her, or give her ‘air time’ (the perilous task of giving her as long as possible without a nappy on, trying to stop her from rolling off the towel we’ve placed her on to help contain any little accidents), the nappy rash keeps coming. Add this to the sore and swollen gums and it’s no wonder she’s cranky.

The thought of another year and a half of this fills me with dread. Part of me wishes these teeth would just hurry up and come in, preferably all at once, to get it all over and done with as quickly as possible. But then the other part of me is in no rush whatsoever to see them come through. A gummy clamp of the jaws from Honor hurts enough, never mind when she gets sharp little incisors to really bite with.