One evening last week we were having a discussion with a certain son of ours. The conversation was really about the fact that this particular child has always had way more energy than is normal for one human being and that by ten o'clock at night in our seventeenth year of living with said child, his parents are feeling way too old to deal with silverware juggling in the kitchen or dance moves in the basement that involve lots of banging against doors, walls and ceilings. What this conversation probably sounded like though was; "What the heck were you thinking?! Why are you being ... YOU.... at 10:00 at night?!" Yeah. That's about right. Then we learned a disturbing fact. He had been getting ready for bed. He had flossed his teeth. He had water pikked his teeth. He just needed to brush still. We were dumb founded. All the twerking and knife throwing was forgotten. He had flossed BEFORE he brushed?! Then he revealed that an older sibling had told him he should do things in that order. We dismissed the older sibling's advice as ridiculously ill informed and sent him back to finish his dental hygiene routine with strict orders to always brush first as all good citizens do.
But then I started to wonder. I texted the older sibling. Had he really told his innocent little brother to floss first? Yes, he had! "I always thought it made more sense than the other way," he texted back. And when I pointed out that the dental hygienist always finished up with the flossing he responded with a: yeah but, "It makes more sense to dislodge things first, then brush." Now I was very curious and began texting and interviewing all of my kids. At home I had one who still did it in the order I am sure we taught them when we deemed them old enough to be trusted to not strangle themselves with a length of dental floss, and three who insisted that it was disgusting to NOT floss first. Away at college we had 2 who floss after and 2 who floss first. I told them they were doing things all wrong and got texts like this back: "No we don't! You wanna get all the stuff out of your teeth before you brush" and "Sounds like you're the one doing it backwards."
I even emailed the missionaries, but while I waited for their Monday evening emails, I decided to google it. "Should you floss before you brush?" It turns out that this is a serious debate outside of my family too. And the majority of those who floss first agree with my children who think it is gross to brush before 'dislodging' any leftover dinner in there, while the rest of us think it is equally gross to stick your hands in your mouth and start 'dislodging' anything before a good, thorough, brushing. One link was to the American Dental Association page, I thought that here at last I would find vindication, after all, my hygienist DOES floss last when she cleans my teeth. But the Dental Association says, and I am paraphrasing here: "Please just floss! Before, after, morning, night; we don't care! But floss!"
So I retracted my earlier order to the child who had originally confessed and unwittingly subjected all his siblings to intense questioning. Floss whenever. There was much cheering that they had won the right to do what seemed right to them in the first place. Not that I believe any of them would have changed their ways anyhow, they just would have remembered to not bring it up anymore. I accepted long ago that my kids come up with their own way to solve math problems that frequently make little sense to me, and that they don't feel compelled to follow my recipe when cooking, and that when they clean the bathroom they don't fold the towels the same way I do. (Though I did put a stop to the bathroom cleaning method that involved dumping some of every cleaning product in the cupboard into the sink to make the perfect cleaning 'potion,' that is the sort of thing that could end in a 911 call). My kids don't do everything my way, and my life would be so boring and predictable if they all did.
Eventually the missionaries emailed back. One flosses after, and one companion thought she was weird for it. The other flosses first, and he asked the other 3 missionaries in his apartment and they all floss first too! Crazy kids.
