If there is one anatomical thing I’ve learned in the past year it’s that teeth are frickin’ small. They might look really big in the mouth, and be able to inflict a decent amount of pain, but in actual fact, in the palm of your hand, they are REALLY. SMALL.
And if you don’t realize this at first, you totally (totally) realize it when you (you, not them) lose one — after it’s already been lost from the head of your child.
LittleMan lost his first tooth in late June 2014, on my 36th birthday. My husband was out of town so a friend had stopped by for a glass of champagne, and the kids lounged lazily in front of the TV munching on nuts and wiggling loose teeth when it popped out! Just like that!
So excited was I about the loss of that tooth, and the photo documentation of the loss of that tooth, that I lost that tooth, somewhere in the weave of our carpet.
First there was silence, and then, as if a gunshot had gone off, all four of us — me, my friend, Babygirl, and LittleMan — dropped to the floor and began crawling around looking for the damned tooth.
“I found it!” cried Babygirl, hoisting up a white Lego.
“Here it is!” LittleMan announced, proffering a large (extraordinarily large) grain of sand.
Somewhere in this process, amid the Legos and the sand and the cracker crumbs and the tiny nibs of peanuts and cashews all masquerading as baby teeth, I was thinking Man, I Need to Vaccuum this Filthy Slum. Fortunately, that feeling was suddenly subsumed by the total and utter relief that I FOUND THE TOOTH! Bloody roots and all! (Tooth Fairy tally: $2)
LittleMan lost his second tooth in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. I was sitting on the edge when his perfect little head burst through the surface, revealing a mouthful of watery blood. “I lost my tooth! My tooth finally came out! Somebody kicked it out!” he sputtered gleefully, as other moms looked on in horror at the bloodbath.
“That’s. SOOOOO. EXCITING!” I panted, grabbing him under the arms and hauling him out of the water to towel him down.
“But what about the tooth?” he asked, pulling away from me towards the edge the pool. It was a rare 75 degree day in San Francisco on a Friday in late August. The place was thronged, the water splashing everywhere as hundreds of schoolchildren gasped in and out.
“The tooth is gone, baby,” I said firmly.
“But we can look for it! It’s in there somewhere!”
“It is in there somewhere,” I said gently. And then, using my most mystical voice, I explained: “And tonight, after all the children have gone home and the water is still and clear in the moonlight, the Tooth Fairy will have no trouble finding it.” Ta-daaaa!
LittleMan, the pragmatist, continued to protest. “But the Tooth Fairy can’t swim!”
“Of course the Tooth Fairy can swim!” — and I expect all of you reading to back me up on that — “But anyway, we are not going to find it with all those people in there.”
(Tooth Fairy tally: $1)
Two more teeth followed, one in the Fall, one around Christmas. Four down.
Last week the stomach flu rampaged through our family. One night after another it knocked us down: LittleMan, then Babygirl, my husband and myself, even my mother, who popped by one afternoon so I could take a walk around the block after being housebound for days with sick children — proof that no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to the stomach flu. The adults were not too terribly knocked out by it, but the children were staggering around vomiting uncontrollably, often right at bedtime, all over the wall-to-wall.
On Tuesday night, three nights in to the stomach flu debacle, LittleMan was full of vim and vigor after his first meal in 48 hours. Babygirl was smack in the throes of the worst of it, which was a source of much intrigue to LittleMan as we scuttled back and forth out of their bedroom through the crucial bedtime hour, changing sheets no fewer than four times, scrubbing floors and doing (more) laundry. We’d wash our hands, shake our heads (This is living, I guess…), take a hopeful sip of wine (Maybe the worst of it is over?) and then: “MOMMMM-EEEE!!! She’s throwing up again!!!” he’d holler helpfully from his perch in the top bunk.
Finally we got her settled on our bed, the less to disrupt him, and we imagined that the evening would calm down. But LittleMan came barreling out one last time.
“I lost my tooth!”
Standing in the kitchen, with piles of laundry waiting to be folded in the next room and two children who hadn’t made it through the night without puking in 72 hours, my husband and I looked at each other, summoning one last miraculous reserve of astonished excitement befitting the occasion.
“That’s…AWESOME!” My husband dutifully examined the tooth, and pulled out a small bowl from the cabinet to keep it in safely. We oohed and aaahed over the hole in LittleMan’s gums where the tooth had been, and talked about how surprised the dentist would be during our visit later that week.
And then we declared it bedtime. Still. Again. Something like that.
“But the tooth needs to go under my pillow,” said LittleMan possessively as we tucked him back into bed, with promises of the magic to come while he slept. (Please sleep. Soon.).
“And we’ll for sure put it there when we go to bed,” I said. “But you’re going to be rolling around, twisting up in your covers, trying to get comfy so you can go to sleep, and it might get lost, and then what would the Tooth Fairy do?”
“I’ve lost my teeth before, like in the pool,” he reasoned. “The Tooth Fairy can find it. She’s magic.”
“Yessssss…” I said, realizing I was being bested at my own game.
My husband went back to fetch the tooth. I went to get an envelope from the desk and sealed the tooth inside it. We placed it under LittleMan’s pillow.
“You just gotta leave it there now, Bud,” advised my husband. “We don’t want it falling or getting lost or anything.”
“I know,” said LittleMan.
“Congrats, Baby. Sleep well now. The Tooth Fairy will come when you’re sleeping.”
Hours later we made arrangements for our own sleep. I would be sharing a bed with Babygirl in case she was sick again (awesome) and my husband would camp in Babygirl’s bottom bunk (claustrophobic), which meant of course that neither one of us anticipated much rest. But still, we had some last business. “Do you have any singles?” I whispered in the dark, fishing under LittleMan’s head for the tooth. My husband silently held up the bounty.
I pulled out the envelope. It had been torn open at one corner; the tooth was gone, having been no doubt marveled over by its onetime owner as he lay there in the dark waiting for sleep. “Where’s the damn tooth?” I moaned.
“It must still be in his bed,” said my husband.
“We have to find it! So the Tooth Fairy can swap it out! Arrrrghhhh!”
The tooth was there, of course, a tiny, hard lump in the folds of the sheets near the head of the bed.
And it only took a few minutes of standing on a chair at 11pm and rooting around LittleMan’s heavy sleeping body to find it.
Priorities.
On some level, I do believe in Magic, in its various unexpected forms. I believe in cultivating magic for my children when I can. But Magic, as it turns out, takes Work. Work, and an ability to defy fatigue. And, in our case, laser-vision. Because if there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that the teeth are not going to make it easy on us.
Leave a Comment