Tales from the Tooth Fairy

Something momentous happened at our house a couple days ago. My oldest lost his sixth tooth on Friday night. For various reasons, the tooth didn't get left for the Tooth Fairy until last night (Sunday). I handed him the special, second-generation bag that his father and aunt and uncle used to use and left him to it. After losing five teeth already, he was a pro and knew what to do.

At midnight, I remembered that I had Tooth Fairy (TF) duty and scrambled down the stairs to his room. I reached under his pillow in the dark and all I could feel was a scrap of paper. I kept searching but came up empty. Thinking that perhaps the paper was leading the TF on a scavenger hunt, I turned the light on to read it:

His tooth was on the floor? Was this a joke? Was he trying to be sneaky? Regardless, I needed to find that tooth. With the hall light on, I got down on my hands and knees and started to scour the floor for that tooth. Nothing. I looked under the bed, just in case he thought that would be funny. Nope.

This wasn't working in the dark anyway. As I considered my options I went upstairs to show the note to the husband. He laughed and told me, "You've GOT to write this down!" Helpful as that information was, I was no where closer to finding this tooth.

A-ha! I had an idea:

I would use the black light that we had purchased for cat-pee finding purposes to now find this elusive tooth. All lights were turned off, black light was turned on and I once more got on my hands and knees, this time grabbing every speck of white fuzz, hoping that it was a tooth. It was no where near his head on the floor so I turned around to search the rest of the room. I searched a bit more and then I spotted what was most certainly his tooth. It was the largest and whitest glowing spot on his floor. I reached out for it and... Victory! What was lost was now found! It was all very biblical.

It was all starting to make sense. The boy went into his room, tooth in hand, ready to put it in the tooth bag and lay it under his pillow when he dropped it. Not being able to find it, he figured that writing a note would be good enough and the TF would find it. It was, after all, a tooth, and TF was, after all, the Tooth Fairy.

Having solved the mystery, I decided to play along and fulfilled my role as TF. Using my best left-handed penmanship, I wrote:

This morning, I asked the boy if he got any money for his tooth, hoping for a good story. All he said was "Yep, a quarter." And that was the end of that.