I can't stop smiling!

Today I got my braces off, and I am incredibly excited. To celebrate, I am showing you pictures of my teeth from the past year or so. I chose to only show my teeth because, as it turns out, most of the pictures that are taken of me are taken when I am camping, canoeing, hiking, or otherwise outdoorsing myself, so I look less than fantastic.

This is a picture of my teeth before braces. As you can see, I had one tooth in particular that stuck out. One person in my youth affectionately referred to it as my "snaggle-tooth." Another person, jokingly, called me Whacked-Out-Tooth-Chick. I didn't like that. When he called me it once, I said, "Well, [name of guy], not everybody's daddy can be a doctor." (His dad was a doctor). That shut him up pretty quickly. (There is hair in my mouth because I was at Delicate Arch in Zion National Park, and it was crazy-windy.

This is a picture when I first got my braces on. The crookedness of the wires emphasizes the crookedness of my teeth. I don't know why Eric was so close to me when he took this picture. I had to wear rubberbands to fix my poor alignment.

At this point, I had had braces for about two months. As you can see, the dontist put springs around the wires to push that snaggle-tooth out. Those springs were intense.

This picture was taken when I had braces about four months. The gap is even bigger than in the other picture. At one point, I could fit a nickel in that gap. And when the dontist decided to close the gap, he put "chains" on which were linked rubberbands rather than seperate rubberbands. The gap closed within 24-hours. Literally. It hurt, but it was exciting!

This picture was taken when I had braces for nine months. I'm not sure why the dontist put a gap in my front teeth, but he did.

In this photo, I had had braces for about 11 months, so I was pretty much done.

And here are my teeth now. Hooray! Beautiful, straight teeth!

Feel free to shower me with compliments.