The Wonder Woman and I have now performed our parental duties as the tooth fairy four times. This is not to say that we have performed those duties flawlessly or even that everything has gone smoothly in the course of our tooth fairy activities. Being the tooth fairy is full of challenges.
The first challenge to overcome as the tooth fairy is monetary. You have to hope that on the day your child loses a tooth you actually have cash on hand, otherwise the fairy has to leave an IOU, someone has to head to the nearest ATM, or you (temporarily of course) have to borrow money from a child’s piggy bank to finance the tooth fairy.
The second challenge is the physical act of removing the tooth from underneath the child’s pillow and replacing it with the cash. The first time we played tooth fairy resembled a Three Stooges skit more than the well-thought out plan of adults with master’s degrees.
I will spare you the blow by blow recall of the disaster which was our first attempt at this vital parenting role. But in summary, by the time we were finished, the Ballerina had woken up (twice), I had accidentally elbowed the Wonder Woman in the top of the head and I finally decided to throw the world’s creakiest wooden stool in the trash. Oh yeah, and we didn’t even have the tooth.
After trying and failing multiple times that night we decided to wait until the morning to give it another go. We basically had two courses of action: get the tooth out right under the Zoologist’s nose, or make up some absurd story about how the Tooth Fairy left the tooth for some strange, totally made up reason. We chose path number one, but kept path number two on the backburner just in case.
The next morning we silently made our way to the kids’ bedroom. Luckily it was still early in the school year, and the kids hadn’t adjusted to getting up earlier for school yet. I climbed the ladder to the Zoologist’s top bunk while the kids started to stir. The Wonder Woman flipped the light on and I gave my son a hug with my right arm while I used my left arm to search for the tooth in its little baggie. He heard the sound of the bag crinkling in my hand, but I distracted him by pointing to the dollar and when he turned around I slipped the tooth to the waiting hands of his mother.
After four lost teeth we’ve definitely gotten better, which is good because we’ve only got 76 more to go.
