When my older son got his first baby teeth at 5 months old, I was surprised. When he got 4 more on the day he turned 6 months old, I was SHOCKED! And, naturally, I assumed that he would lose his baby teeth somewhere around 3 since they came in so early. This was not to be. We found ourselves approaching his 7th birthday and he had still not lost any teeth. He had, however, started growing the permanent teeth behind the bottom baby teeth. Fantastic. I called up the dentist and she gave the teeth 30 days to evacuate the premises before she evicted them.
I fed him tons of hard foods and we both took turns wiggling the crap out of those teeth. Nothing but a little “watch me stay right where I am” movement. So, earlier this week, we found ourselves back at the dentist for the tooth extermination. One of the teeth was almost out and had I really thought about the price difference between me yanking the bad boy out vs. the dental assistant doing it, I would have probably sat on my son’s head and done it the old fashioned way. Darn my sympathetic heart that wouldn’t allow myself to “cause him pain”. So stupid. The other tooth wouldn’t budge so the dentist had to vacuum it out. VACUUM! Who knew? Wonder if my Bissel would have done the trick?
Anyhow, since we knew the day was coming, my son wanted to make a place for the Tooth Fairy to place his ‘hard-earned’ money. We searched online but both of us were a little too lazy to go all out this time so we then decided just to find something we already had at the house and spruce it up a bit. We found some plastic harmonica cases that the kids never use because it would be too much to actually reinsert the harmonicas into their proper place once the torturous beautiful music was over. We had 3 so we were able to make one for each kid, even though my younger son shouldn’t need one for at least 3 more years.
They each chose a small scrap of paper to add to the bottom of the case.
The we cut out our version of a tooth (for the record, I did go to Michael's to look for teeth stickers so that the boxes could be more authentic, but alas, there were no teeth to be found so we had to just draw some ourselves; they’re slightly funky, but it works anyway) and we added their names with “fancy” letter stickers.
It wasn’t the prettiest product or the most ingenious idea, but the kids liked it, we didn’t have to spend any money and it only took a few minutes! Now that’s my kind of project!
That night we placed the tooth box, the money box and a note to the Toothfairy explaining what happened to the 2nd tooth, under his pillow and waited for morning.
Now, I asked around about what the going rate for the Toothfairy was these days and got a bunch of different answers. And, while I would love to be able to pay my kids a ton of money for their multiple chompers, I had to set a realistic expectation for the future, knowing that I had 3 mouths preparing to lose teeth (not to mention that the first two teeth lost weren’t really lost so I had to pay a fortune to the dentist in addition to the Toothfairy fee). So, we went with $1 per tooth (which is all he was expecting anyway), plus an extra for being brave at the dentist’s office. And, since my son is fascinated with interesting money, I went to the bank and got a $2 bill and a gold $1 coin as his payment. Obviously the Toothfairy wouldn’t carry regular money! Duh! The plan was a success and he was very excited to see that he got even more than he asked for in his note!
