Sometimes I think teeth are the poor maligned organs of modern childhood. But then they aren’t really organs at all, are they? My dictionary says they are “hard, bony appendages.” Well, the poor maligned appendages, then.

They’re the first culprit when anything is amiss in the non-speaking set. Babies hit the four-month sleep regression, and people start saying it: I think he’s teething. Fussy nine-month old? She must be getting new teeth. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Babies get more teeth all the time; if you claim that yours is teething long enough, it ought to become true after a while.

Sadie, I mentioned before, has not been sleeping well. Or hardly at all. I want to say it’s getting better. Certainly the last couple of nights were nothing compared to the horror of sleeplessness that defined last week, but she’s nowhere close to sleeping normally. She has also been—to phrase this politely—a wee bit cranky during the day. All day. Every day.

“Is she teething?” People keep asking. “Maybe it’s her teeth.”

Oddly enough, in nine and a half years of parenting, I have not developed x-ray vision. I have no idea if it’s her teeth. All I know is that I haven’t slept more than five hours a night in almost two weeks.

I haven’t seen any evidence of teething. She’s not been drooling, or refusing hard or cold or hot foods, or rubbing her gums. But two-year-olds do get molars. Anything’s possible.

Tonight at dinner she refused to eat, spent the whole time rubbing her gums.

I think it took me three seconds to leap to the teething theory.

“I think it’s her teeth,” I told Dane.

“Could be,” he said.

I took her out of her chair and set her in my lap. And then she took her fingers out of her mouth and ate her dinner without further complaint.

I’m back to my original theory: she’s two. Her teeth may or may not be involved in that. I have no idea. Poor maligned teeth.