I don’t remember much about losing my teeth. I do remember I was excited to leave my teeth under my pillow for the Tooth Fairy. I bet I spent my tooth money at Gigot’s Pharmacy, buying as much candy as I could for my precious handful of change, but I don’t remember how any of my teeth fell out. All I can remember is worrying too much about how much it would hurt.
My son’s first loose tooth started to wiggle the day his cousin and her boyfriend arrived for a holiday visit. Her boyfriend is studying to be a dentist which made P that much more excited to have a loose tooth. He was overly excited to slurp spaghetti through the new hole, but he was never worried, only excited. The tooth came out while I was running errands. I was devastated to miss it. When I asked him how it came out he said nonchalantly, “I pulled it out.” Huh.
Leading up to the big event we read several books, my favorite was one of the Toot and Puddle books, Charming Opal by Holly Hobbie. We also enjoyed Andrew’s Loose Tooth by Robert Munsch, Maisy, Charley, and the Wobbly Tooth by Lucy Cousins, and My Wobbly Tooth Must Never Fall Out by Lauren Child. We haven’t yet read Doctor De Soto by William Steig, but I plan on it. It’s the “tooth book” I remember best from my childhood. Next time, we’ll also watch Dwayne Johnson’s The Tooth Fairy. It may be hokey, but it captures the magic of believing well.
I was simply going to take the tooth out of the envelope and replace it with a dollar bill. This was the plan. Then P told me he was expecting a silver dollar because that’s what the girls at school got. Let’s be clear here. All I had was a $20 bill. No single dollars, no silver dollars, no quarters. I sneaked into his room and stole/borrowed a dollar bill from his bank. Gasp! I rifled through all my crafty stuff to see how I could dress it up. I settled on a little red ribbon, gold glitter, a note and a gauzy bag. I see now there’s a tooth fairy business thriving out there on the internet. You can even pay to have someone create a letter or certificate to your child from the Tooth Fairy. There are other fun sites to give you ideas (oh, that I had seen this earlier!) and potential traditions like this one. I even see that some parents are giving out $10 a tooth. I’m not quite sure losing something should earn you that much money, and let’s be honest, we need to save what we can to fix the teeth that aren’t going to come in right!
I did pretty well. He woke up in the middle of the night, discovered the pretty little bag from the Tooth Fairy and padded into our room. “Look, Mom. The Tooth Fairy came,” He whispered and crawled into bed next to me. He was up early, snapping the new dollar bill and “reading” the note from the Tooth Fairy. Not long after we got up he asked, “Can we have spaghetti tonight?”
Nope. We didn’t spend a fortune or have a professional Tooth Fairy impersonator, but we did all right.
We would put minimal money, a couple of quarters maybe a dollars worth, under Nathan’s pillow. But we always added an interesting stone or a feather or a fossil. I just felt it was important to be more than monetary. Of course he doesn’t remember this at all.