On our way home from Mexico, Archer and I were enjoying our tight little capsule of space on the airplane when he experienced an abrupt shift in attitude. Until this point, he was the very essence of politeness and good humor; flirting with other passengers, sitting patiently on my lap, playing coy games of peek-a-boo with surly teenagers in the rows behind us. But he had finally snapped, determined to fulfill the crabby-baby-on-long-flight-from-hell stereotype once and for all. I had been nursing him intermittently, achieving the desired effect of calming him and helping him to doze, but we were approaching the fifth hour of containment, and I felt I had to pull out the secret weapon: a big ol' bottle of formula.
I reached blindly into the bag at my feet while he squirmed and whined, straining to find the tall glass bottle with the pre-measured amount of magic powder. When I finally clutched it and brought it into Archer's field of vision, he went nuts. As I beckoned the flight attendant for some water to mix it up, he began straining and clawing at it as if it were the holy grail. This desperate clambering continued until I got the water and began to shake the bottle. Simultaneously he lunged, jaws open.
Tooth met glass with a mighty clink, and Archer's mouth spread wide in a bloody, silent sob.
Fortunately the bleeding stopped immediately, as did the crying when Archer got his lips around the bottle's nipple. When he finished the formula and was contented again, I stuck a finger in his maw to assess the damage. Sure enough, a chunk had chipped out of his top left tooth.
I'd love to report that the woes ended there. After all, it was a tiny little chip in his baby tooth. But no. This story ends with me nursing him a few hours later and discovering that this little snaggle tooth had become a demented torture device, acting as a chard of broken glass that would eventually bore a hole in my nipple that would in turn become infected and cause intense burning pain.
This incident gets categorized under plain old wierd stuff that happens to moms I guess. I ended up filing the tooth down with an emory board and pumping until the nipple wound healed. Crazy.