Just put them back in your cakehole

Some people do it. I do not. There are many purposes for teeth, most commonly to assist in the task of eating, but some purposes should be banned.

One of those purposes would be using your teeth to help you open things, such as packets and packaging. Who wants to be handed an open package all covered in someone else’s spittle? I can do without that kind of help. It’s a filthy habit. It’s a dangerous habit, you could hurt your teeth, or your jaw, or accidentally swallow the chard that your teeth have shreded. No. I’m sorry, but that’s one function that should be strictly off limits. I cannot imagine where anyone would acquire this deviant habit from, as I certainly do not qualify as a model in this particular department. Even though my teeth do join now, they haven’t for the last 46 years, so it certainly wasn’t me! My reputation is untarnished, although the teeth could probably do with a buff.

We fight our way through the fist session of homework of the new school year, one of the most tortuous periods of the day. This period, that should take approximately 10 to 15 minutes, expands into a two hour marathon. My scrambled brain recognizes that I need a new campaign and certainly a new approach to the Bedlam that I am forced to witness and participate in.

I clutch a sharpened pencil in each hand to pass over to the next child that either hurls a pencil or breaks a pencil, from my box of nearly a hundred sharpened pencils. I need to instigate a ‘be kind to pencils’ campaign forthwith. My youngest growls and worries a pencil in his teeth. Another tip breaks off and his sister intervenes, “don’t do that dingbat, yu’ll poison yurself, they’ve got lead in em!” He drops it like a hot poker and grabs another, rips off the eraser to ram in his mouth.
“Don’t do that dear, you’ll break your teeth!” He refuses to relinquish the pencil so I nip into the kitchen to dig out a more suitable biting instrument, as I have already mortgaged my soul to the dentist. He drops the pencil on the tablecloth in a pool of drool. Poor pencil. Poor teeth! I look at the end of the mangled pencil, eraserless with the mental cap crushed with the tiny indentations of baby teeth.
“Is dah washing machine difficult to break?”
“Um…..not really. Why do you want to know?”
“Is it be broken in dah earthquake?”
“Probably not. It’s made of metal.”
“I thought it was made of dah steel.”
“Oh er ..well yes. I suppose it is.”
“Steel is dah strongest.” I wish I had a copy of the school curriculum. I need to know if it’s earthquake awareness week or whether they’re learning about different building materials or both? My knowledge of raw materials is limited to the ‘animal, vegetable or mineral’ variety, although I used to know a great deal about coal.

“My teef are being dah strong!”
“Indeed.” We both examine the all too visual evidence, crayon carnage.
“I fink my teef are dah earthquake poof!”

Another retrofit mouth?