The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A good TRUE story from a friend of mine…

For What Its Worth – Tooth Fairy Fails 

Last week my son lost his first two baby teeth.  This gave us two chances to wow him with a surprise from the Tooth Fairy (rumored to be Santa Clause’s mistress).  The whole thing caught my wife and I by surprise.  We didn’t have a game plan on how to actually set up the tooth drop off and subsequent money exchange.  For Christmas each year we set out cookies and milk, make sure we leave ADA compliant egress to the fireplace and put our son to sleep.  As soon as he’s sleeping we take a few bites of cookies, drink the glass of milk down to half, and pile the gifts under the tree.   Since this was our family’s first tooth fairy operation, there was bound to be complications.  Like, for example, what if you put the tooth in a tiny container under his pillow and somehow forget to make the money drop?  How do you deal with a kid who wakes up crying because that old witch-fairy didn’t bother to visit?   Or, for example, what if the tooth is lost before it can be buried under the pillow?   How do you deal with a kid who bursts into tears because he’s not going to have anything to offer the Tooth Witch?  Yes, both those things happened to us last week.  How would you handle those situations?  Would you tell him it was going to be OK, distract him with something else and let him realize that life goes on?   Or would you take some heroic measures to maintain the fantasy and preserve his childhood innocence?  You guessed it, we took the heroic route to save that Tooth Witch’s reputation.

We took the time to put his tooth in a tiny box in preparation for the great tooth fairy visit overnight.  We woke up the next morning to the familiar sound of our bedroom door creaking open but this time, our son was sniffling and crying.  “The Tooth Fairy didn’t come!” he whimpered.  We acted shocked and told him she must have been busy but that’s really unusual.  We told him she would probably come tomorrow.  As we all mobilized into our routines of dressing, combing, brushing and eating I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had let our boy down.  So while he was brushing his teeth, I tiptoed into his bedroom, opened his window to let the blistering cold air rush in.  I left the window wide open, replaced the tooth box with a fist full of cash and tiptoed out.  A few minutes later he calls me, “Dad!”.  I came in pretending to be too busy to pay much attention.   He pointed at the window and I immediately started scolding him about how he should never open windows because its dangerous.  He proclaimed his innocence but I insisted “if you didn’t open it then who did?”.  Poor kid didn’t get it so I nudged him along by asking if he thinks the tooth fairy was running late.   His eyes opened wide and he rushed to the pillow to uncover $5.  His smile was well worth the 10 minutes of internet surfing time it cost me that morning.  Mission accomplished, Tooth Fairy lives to fly another day…and she did.