Motherhood FAIL of the Week: Human Woodchuck

The Muffin Man is teething.  Again.  I feel as though the kid has been teething without cessation for the past six months, but this time it's full force, chew-on-everything, covered in drool teething.  I honestly have no idea what tooth (teeth?) are coming in, since he basically has a full set of chompers including molars, but I live in fear that one morning I'll walk into his bedroom and discover that he's sprouted some sort of Paleolithic fangs while he slept.  Anyway, whatever the cause may be my poor child is miserable and spends his days in search of anything that looks as though it might feel good when applied to his aching gums.  I, of course, give him doses of my hippie-dippy teething remedy, but you're not supposed to exceed a certain dosage in a day, and we've usually reached that threshold by noon.  The balance of my days over the past week have been spent prying inappropriate objects from Noah's mouth while simultaneously trying to avoid my fingers becoming a teething toy; this is not an easy feat, I assure you.

Yesterday afternoon Noah and I were hanging out in the living room playing with some safe, child-friendly toys designed to be chewed on/thrown/mangled.  With Noah otherwise occupied, I figured it was probably safe to take my focus off of him for a minute or two while I sorted through the mail, so I walked across the room to retrieve the (towering) pile of unopened bills and fashion magazines I'll never have a chance to read.  When I turned back around, to my horror, I discovered Noah lying on the floor chewing through the leg of our coffee table.  That's right, my friends, in the 45 seconds it took me to retrieve the mail, my son had turned himself into a human woodchuck and made significant progress gnawing through a solid piece of wood.  I'm going to assume, for my sanity's sake, that it felt good on his aching teeth and not that he has some sort of weird strange obsession that could land him on TV.

For a split second I actually considered letting him chew on the coffee table for a little bit longer, but then I got my wits about me.  First of all, I really like my coffee table and would prefer not to have to replace it due to a whittled-down leg.  Second of all, I'm pretty sure that the spray paint I used on the table is toxic, and the last thing I wanted to do on a Tuesday evening was rush Noah to the hospital for paint poisoning (especially since that would really give my nosy neighbor something to call CPS about).  I quickly and efficiently detached my child's jaws of steel from my furniture, handed him a frozen teething ring which he promptly threw at my head, and contemplated swabbing his gums with a little bourbon.  Don't worry, I opted for Baby Tylenol instead; after all, the kid will have enough years of illegal boozing in high school without my getting him started too early.