tough kookie

I took Zibby to the dentist to get her routine cleaning yesterday and the girl ended up getting a tooth pulled. It was one of her molars, a baby tooth that had abscessed.
Poor Zibby has been our best "tooth brusher" but her baby teeth are the worst. The dentist said that it may be from how sick she was as a baby.
Needless to say we are grateful for dental insurance and that God gave us all two sets of teeth!
But what I'm wondering is how in the world Zibby wasn't complaining about being in pain.
I've had an abscessed tooth. "Painful" is putting it lightly.
So, Zibby gets a shot in her mouth and doesn't flinch.
Gets her tooth pulled and hears it "pop"...which doesn't seem to bother her either.
Then the dentist shows me the tooth.
It is seriously rotted out...a cave of a tooth that had been collecting food for sometime.
As gross as I know that sounds I still just keep thinking to myself how painful that must have been.
A few weeks ago she mentioned to me that her tooth didn't "feel right", but I didn't think much of it knowing that her cleaning was coming up soon and they would check it out.
How did she walk around with her tooth like that?
I mean, she has been extra naughty lately and earned her fair share of "consequences" so now, looking back on it I can tell that she hasn't been feeling really well.
And now that I look back on her eight years of life I realize that this is how she deals with discomfort....being an unbearably naughty, volcano explosive, or stubbornly quiet...these are her signs that something is a wrong.
Like the bladder infection we didn't know anything about until she was peeing blood (aha! that's why she was so out of sorts that week.)
Or the hearing loss she experienced as a toddler from those constant ear infections we knew nothing about. (oh! now, we know why she was so pale and quiet and cranky and tired all the time!)
Or the times we find her cleaning up her own vomit after getting so sick but not thinking to call on us to help her out. (changing her sheets and scrubbing off her floor at four years old and Ben coming to tell us, "did you know that Zibby got sick and is now cleaning herself and her room up?")
I'll never forget the time she got her finger slammed in the closet door and needed stitches.
She wanted to watch the numbing shots go into her finger and she wanted to watch them stitch up her skin.
I think that's intense.
And that's what Zibby is.
Intense.
She is 100 mph at everything she does.
Like flying down the hill riding her bike side saddle with an arabesque...that's Zibby.
All Girl..
All Brave...
All Stubborn...
All Heart...
every single second of the day.