That drying step is the worst. I swear, the first time I tried to use one of those temp kits, I ended up sitting on the bathroom floor with my mouth w...

Brushing together definitely sounds like way less drama than wrestling with playlists. I tried the “pick your song” thing with my niece once, and we s...

Interdental brushes are basically tiny medieval torture devices the first week, at least in my hands. I kept thinking I was either missing half the gu...

You're definitely not alone there—I swear I’ve spent more time inspecting my teeth than actually eating since I got braces. That random zap thing is t...

Bread is my arch-nemesis right now. I thought it’d be the chips or popcorn, but nope—plain old sandwich bread just grabs the wax and peels it right of...

I get the “wrestling an octopus” description way too well—sometimes it feels like my mouth is the octopus and I’m losing the fight. I’m still new to t...

Honestly, I totally get the feeling silly part—my PT had me making these weird fish-face stretches in front of the mirror and I just kept thinking, “I...

I always wondered about the ER thing too, and honestly, I was panicking so much during my first “my face is twice its normal size” moment that I almos...

That’s exactly what I’m worried about—my front tooth has a tiny filling and now I’m paranoid it’ll stick out like a sore thumb if I go through with wh...

Honestly, reading this makes me feel a bit better about my own dental anxiety. I’ve got a molar hanging on by a thread, and every time I think about g...

Haha, reading this thread is giving me flashbacks to my first extraction—talk about anxiety central. My dentist gave me similar advice about straws an...

Haha, reminds me of when my niece got hooked on bubblegum toothpaste—we thought we'd cracked the code at first. But then she started eating it straigh...

Timers worked surprisingly well for us, at least for a while. We had one shaped like a little frog that ticked down two minutes, and my daughter got s...