Advice from other toddler moms

Two questions requiring advice, please.

1) For those of you in the NE, what do you do to make sure your kids are tick free after playing outside?  For my in-laws who have the house with the lawn, the solution is just to keep the kid indoors, but that seems absurd.

2) What have you done/ are you doing about teeth brushing?  B has 7 teeth and he uses a toothbrush every day or so, but it's not real "brush for 2 minutes" brushing.  Instead, he likes to hold it and chew on it and is not a fan at ALL of mommy brushing his teeth for him. Am I supposed to be doing something else?  (And no, I cannot use a finger brush.  He bites. Hard.)

Obviously I am not working very hard today.

I wish I had something to say

I'm still here.

D&E was fine.  Really.  Perhaps my assessment of this was made more positive by the large amount of sedating drugs I was given immediately beforehand, but I've had little cramping and limited spotting and it's been over a week, so I think I'm past the most of it.

Turned out that doctor to whom my RE refers for that procedure actually happened to be my OB, and so it was nice not to have to see a stranger for something so difficult.  She was really wonderful and made a difficult procedure as easy as it could be.

She also told me something that I keep repeating to myself: a healthy pregnancy can be sustained even in the most adverse circumstances. So that my pregnancy ended had nothing to do with me or lifting a heavy baby or not drinking quite enough water or any of the myriad things I feel that I did to screw this up.

Because we just wanted everything to be done with and to get some closure, we decided not to do genetic testing.  I think that if we had found out that the embryo was chromosomally normal, it would have been harder for me, so frankly I'd rather just not know.

Occasionally, I still think that I am pregnant.  Because for a month I was.  But I'm not.

Instead, I'm trying to get a plan in place by which we can squeeze in another cycle in July between some vacations.  Since I tend to stim for about 100 days (or 15, whatever), it's mighty tight, and involves about 5 hours of additional train or driving but I'm not really interested in waiting until mid-August.

So much for this being simple.