Kiss My Knits!

Last week, Emily mentioned that one of her teeth was loose, and she wanted the tooth fairy to come. I said we had to wait until the tooth fell out for the tooth fairy to come. “We can make a pretend tooth,” she offered. I said that if we did that, then the tooth fairy wouldn’t come for her real tooth, only the pretend one. She opted to wait. However, she did say that the tooth fairy was sick and had a cold, and we needed to leave her a cough drop.

Oooookay. Anyway, we found a cough drop, put it in her tooth box (actually a ring box) and left it out. “She can take the cough drop, but she won’t leave me anything,” Emily said. This was good, because the tooth fairy wasn’t going to leave anything anyway – she can’t stop by and leave money every time something random gets stuck in the tooth box. So that night, the tooth fairy came and got the cough drop.

After all this, I knew that Emily’s tooth was loose. She told me this morning that it was going to fall out. Looking at it, it certainly did seem ready. This is the first tooth Emily’s lost this way. They were baby teeth that had been loose forever, but weren’t falling out while the permanent teeth grew in. She was having cavities filled anyway, so they went ahead and yanked them. So she was very nervous about this. She decided to get her ring box and hold it under her mouth so that when the tooth fell out, it would land right in the ring box. I finally got her to at least move out of her room, and then to sometimes put the box down.

This was all making her anxious. She’d never had this happen before, and she didn’t want me to touch it or look at it. I promised I wouldn’t touch it unless she wanted me to. She was quite conflicted, asking me what she could do to make it fall out. I suggested she wiggle it with her tongue, eat some apple, wiggle it with her finger… but she was too nervous about it to do anything. She did wiggle it with her tongue some. Finally she just flat out said, “I’m scared” with tears in her eyes. I walked a balancing act between distracting her with activities and just leaving her alone. I explained over and over that this happens all the time, it doesn’t hurt, etc. She did calm down, although there was no way I was getting her out of her pajamas or out of the house until that tooth went, so we settled in for the day.

Finally about 12:30 she said, “It’s gone!” and ran with her tooth box back into her room. Sure enough, she’d lost the tooth, which was secure in her ring box. (We really should have thought more about a choice of container when the tooth fairy started coming. You don’t want a box that closes with a loud SNAP!)

She also told me a story:
“Once upon a time, there was a tooth in a mouth that turned into money! There was a tooth that didn’t fall out of anything. It turned into a penny and fell out of the mouth.”

Clearly, she’s looking forward to that Susan B. Anthony dollar that the tooth fairy traditionally brings her. I don’t think we’ll have trouble getting her to bed tonight.


So here’s a picture of her, toothless, chocolate chip cookie-covered, in all her cute and disgusting glory. As my husband noted, “She looks like a half-orc!”

FOR THE HORDE!