(hank and his two special teeth recently)
these days there’s a lot of talk about “nepo babies” and how the pressure to live up to famous parents can be crushing. also, that anything these nepos accomplish isn’t really theirs to claim because they couldn’t possibly have reached that level of success without the tremendous access afforded them by their superstar parents. i am just a “regular baby” (as are my human kids) so i have never had to deal with this kind of problem myself. hank, however, is a different story. his bio father, copper cooper, is a well known champion, awarded many times over in AKC championships. as he is described in the press:
“cooper is everything that a french bulldog should be, he is very structurally correct, he has an excellent strong front, tight toes and a magnificent headpiece. he has a great topline and tail set and excellent movement from all sides. he has correct rear angulation and powerful drive. cooper is the perfect size at 26 pounds, he is well muscled and exemplifies the substance, balance and breed type that is important for a frenchie to have. we love his fabulous temperament, he is very friendly, good natured and affectionate and he LOVES to play. he is a joy to be around!” - starlit mesa
(hank’s dad on the AKC podium, which is like winning an oscar or an olympic gold medal!)
(another win for copper cooper!)
(a papparazzi shot of copper cooper running naked in the grass… he just has no privacy - like all those photos of matthew mcconaughey jogging shirtless on the beach with a toothbrush in his mouth or ben affleck smoking outside of dunkin’ donuts)
of course that is A LOT to live up to for hank. while i’ve never wanted to discourage him from having a relationship with his bio dad, i have also really restricted his screentime use because i didn’t want him googling his father and feeling “less than.” i think hank is absolutely perfect, but according to the AKC (american kennel club) hank isn’t as ideally lean and athletic as his father. nor does he have the perfect hollywood grin of copper cooper. in fact, hank’s teeth have always been a little quirky (which i LOVE) and a couple of them have been slowly migrating so that they are technically no longer in his mouth… they peek out even when his lips are closed tight.
(baby hank with all of his teeth IN his mouth)
(teenage hank - his teeth are still pretty lined up!)
(here hank’s teeth are starting to migrate!)
i have always appreciated a charming, lopsided, grin (think young tom cruise), which is why i never wanted the chip in my front tooth fixed (i swam into a pool wall when coming up for air when i was about nine.) i LOVED all the crazy stages of my children’s teeth coming in and out and in again and i was a little sad when their braces lined up their teeth so perfectly that they lost their character. luckily, theo never wears his retainer so his teeth have shifted again and are a little crooked now. lucy, on the other hand, has done a 180 on her teeth.
(theo and i have similar teeth… this is before he had braces - some are sideways! but they are moving around and look a lot like mine again)
as a toddler, lucy was obsessed with a fake set of wonky teeth she stole from her brother that she wore EVERYWHERE, leaving them on her bedside table each night like dentures. eventually, she accumulated a vast collection of cockeyed teeth that she wore in rotation. at three, she knocked a (real) front one out on the bathtub so she had a huge gap in her mouth long before any of her contemporaries. she was so PROUD of her hole, especially because it merited a visit from the tooth fairy years before any of her girlfriends received one. (both of my kids had a pretty intense relationship with the tooth fairy - corresponding back and forth on wide ranging topics. i DID save these letters, but with all the moves i could only find a couple.) so for YEARS lucy was missing various teeth. and then, when the bigs grew in, she had a chic lauren hutton gap between the two front ones. i adored her gap. by the time she was in eighth grade the space had disappeared, but for some reason, the ortho determined that she still needed braces (something about her alignment or jaw?) and then lucy became obsessed with her teeth in a totally different way. the girl who had reveled in her crazy plastic teeth and her own gaping smile that looked like a building with some of the lights turned off decided she wanted her teeth to be absolutely perfect. in fact, she refused to let the ortho remove her braces for several visits because she wasn’t convinced that they were completely lined up. finally, the ortho took a straight ruler to the X-ray so she could prove to lucy that her teeth actually were in total alignment. we were so relieved about that because we were getting ready to move and didn’t want to fly lucy back to boulder just to get her braces removed. but have you EVER heard of a kid who DIDN’T want to get her braces off? i certainly haven’t and her ortho (who had been in the teeth business for decades hadn’t either.) to this day, lucy, who can be pretty forgetful about a lot of things (unplugging her flatiron, putting dirty clothes in the hamper, rather than on the floor) is meticulous about wearing her retainer.
(lucy’s original set of wacky teeth)
(lucy when she had hardly any teeth)
(lucy was pretty bold in her requests from the tooth fairy)
(theo was always interested in the logistics of the operation!)
(lucy is not subtle!)
since we never planned on thrusting hank into the glittery, high-stress life of a show dog, we never considered braces for him. he is very content with his low-key lifestyle of napping, snacking, cuddling, dog park visits, napping, walks around the marina and long sleeps. he doesn’t get hounded for autographs or appearances, he doesn’t obsess over whether he should be micro dosing GLP-1s for those pesky extra five pounds, he doesn’t need a PR team to manage his socials and he’s never had a stylist. we just enjoy him the way he is and get a kick out of monitoring where his two little teeth go.
