The First Baby Tooth

Not too long ago I wrote about how Aden lost her very last baby tooth.  I am feeling overwhelmed by how grown up she seems lately.  In many ways she's still my snuggly little girl, but now when I catch an unexpected glimpse of her moving through a room, poised and tall, she doesn't register as a kid anymore.  I don't truly understand where that baby went, the one I used to hoist up by my shoulder who would drape her tiny arm around my neck and stroke me lightly with her hands that had dimples for knuckles.

Proud of his Longest Road card

This week Quinn lost his first baby tooth.  He is also growing up faster than I'm ready to deal with.  Quinn recently started piano lessons and has learned how to play Settlers of Catan.

He is still my little barnacle boy, but instead of being a baby glued to my hip he's a tall kindergartener who cuddles as close as he can whenever I sit down and hugs my arm with both of his as we walk.  And now all those little teeth I watched coming in six years ago are starting to come out.

Our tooth fairy tradition has been to put a little present under the pillow in exchange for the tooth.  For Aden it was mostly Pokemon toys for a long time, then we switched to Littlest Pet Shop toys, then a string of things she was disappointed with before her last tooth came out and she got a stuffed dog that she adores.  Mona hasn't lost a tooth in about a year, and I'm not sure what to put under her pillow next time it comes up.  She's appreciative of everything, so I don't stress about it particularly.

But for Quinn I wasn't sure what to do.  That first tooth sets a precedent.  If you give your kid a dollar he will always expect a dollar.  The types of toys I'd given the girls didn't seem to fit him as well.  When he showed me his tooth was loose a couple of weeks ago I started thinking about it.

Magic

I love this time of year.  Despite the shortened days and the stress and the hassle and the fact that all my kids' birthdays fall into this same avalanche of figuring out gifts and logistics and trying to remember that this is supposed to be fun.

This year for holiday cards Mommy's Sweatshop cranked out dozens of snowflakes cut from origami paper.  The kids did a nice job, although they didn't point out until after we mailed them all that maybe it wasn't good to have made some from yellow paper since what kind of a message is that to get yellow snow?  (Ah, well, too late.  Anyone who got an inadvertent pee card, we still love you I swear.)

It's funny with holiday cards because I read all the time about how social media has killed the need for them and who uses the post office, etc.  But for a dying practice there are a surprising number of cards on our mantle.  I think we're up to at least 20 and it makes opening the mail a really pleasant part of my day.  I don't expect anyone else to bother, but I enjoy going through my whole address book and thinking about everyone I've collected there and sending along a card and sometimes pictures of my kids.  I like to think it's brightening someone else's day when they bring in their mail.

We've made spritz cookies in the shapes of wreathes and trees like my grandma used to do, and this weekend we will make her stollen (which is a bread with a glaze on it and decorated with candied cherries).  When Aden and I make grandma's stollen we don't include the citron that none of us like, but I miss picking those bitter little pieces out of my slice while chatting with my grandma at her kitchen table.  I'm not a good enough writer to express how much I miss my grandma.

With so much tragedy in the news lately I'm appreciating more than usual the comfortable bubble that is our home.  Inside our walls we've been lucky that traumatic events have been few.  There are coughs and runny noses, bills to pay, frustration with homework, repeated reminders about chores or violin practice, endless laundry....  But with the tears over practicing or homework come the breakthroughs, and we often dump the clothes that need sorting onto my bed and make it a folding party while we watch cartoons together.  There are annoyances and irritations in the day to day no matter who we are, but I'm fortunate that my life is filled with more hugs than squabbles, more dog nuzzles than messes, and after two deployments I never take for granted that my husband is home.  Compared to real problems in the outside world the things we tend to fret about currently rank as mere concerns or issues.

One of my concerns in the bubble at the moment is that Aden is conflicted about Santa Claus.  She's eleven, so she's choosing to be conflicted.

The Last Baby Tooth

My oldest child just turned eleven.

I still remember her as the beautiful baby she was over a decade ago.  Aden was the perfect training baby.  She was patient, seeming to forgive all our bumbling as we taught ourselves what to do as new parents.  She ate well and was sleeping through the night at about four months.  She was bald for a long time and her eyes were (are) incredibly blue.  And I don't care what any expert says about when children develop empathy because in Aden's case she was sensitive to the feelings of others from very early on.  Anytime she saw me cry she would cry too.  She's my tenderhearted girl.

Ready to decorate!

We had a sleepover party for her this past weekend that included the girls making their own pizzas for dinner, a couple of games of Aden's own invention, and our own version of Cupcake Wars.  That was fun.  We baked a gabillion mini cupcakes and set out frosting and marshmallows and fruit and sprinkles and sugar paper and modeling chocolate and then set a timer for different decorating challenges.  (One round was 'the ocean', then 'zombies', then the holiday of their choice....)  They had a five minute time limit on each round and the judges were me, Mona, Quinn, and our dog Chipper (who gave everyone a ten each time which we assumed was correct based on the level of tail wagging he exhibited when we held him up to look at the cupcakes).  Ian got to judge the final round of displays.  The winners got to eat their cupcakes.  The losers had to eat their cupcakes. 

I was impressed at Aden's party how inclusive she was of her siblings.  Mona and Quinn did not get pushed off to the side just because friends were over.  She's a good big sister, and she may not be the best example for getting her chores or homework done without prompting, but she's wonderful about leading her little pack of siblings in a harmonious way.

Earlier this week on Aden's actual birthday she lost her final baby tooth. 

Unmasked! (Babble)

Well, not that I had an actual mask, but my identity as the tooth fairy was recently revealed.

Our tooth fairy routine has been to put a small toy under the pillow in exchange for a tooth.  (Tip for those with kids who still just have teeth coming in and not going out yet: putting the lost tooth in a sandwich baggie under the pillow makes for much simpler retrieval in the dark.)  I always got a quarter from the tooth fairy as a kid, and that was fun too, but in our house I thought little toys would be nice.  I keep a little stash of things in a box in my room just for tooth fairy prizes, usually Littlest Petshop toys or small stuffed animals.

This went fine for a long time, and I liked hearing the shriek of excitement down the hall in the mornings when the prize was discovered.  But the last three tooth fairy prizes have left Aden disappointed, and there has been only sad silence to hear on those mornings from my bed.  Mona is still happy with everything, but Aden’s gotten pickier about certain toys, and I just guessed wrong each time I chose something for her.

I suggested maybe she should leave the tooth fairy a note with a list about what kinds of things she would like from now on.  I also told her it was fine to tell the tooth fairy to leave her money like most of her friends get for their teeth.  She just said no, she just wanted the right toys, but it was hard to figure out what she thought those might be.

Saturday when I got home from work I started chopping vegetables in the kitchen and Aden came in to work on peeling a pomegranate nearby.  While we worked she told me that she’d lost a tooth a few days back when she was at a friend’s house.  She’d put it under her pillow the night before without telling us about it and it was still there in the morning.  I told her maybe the tooth fairy just didn’t know what to get her anymore and was still thinking about it.

She came around to my side of the counter, sidled up against me, looked up into my face and said quietly (so her brother and sister in the next room wouldn’t hear), “I think mama is the tooth fairy.”  I try not to lie to my kids, and I certainly do my best to answer truthfully when asked anything directly, so I touched her on the nose and said she was right.  She looked both pleased and let down at the same time.

I took the opportunity to explain my thinking about the last few prizes that she didn’t like.  For instance, there was a fake jewel about the size of a half dollar that I picked up at an estate sale because I thought she would think it was as beautiful as I did, and it was interesting because it was old.  She said knowing more about it made it more special, and was sorry she hadn’t reacted positively to it at the time.

We worked at the counter quietly for a while, then Aden asked if my mom and dad were the tooth fairy to me when I was a kid.  I told her yes.  Being the tooth fairy was one of the fun parts of being a parent.

Aden walked with me to Target after dinner.  We admired the spooky decorations some of the neighbors have out, enjoyed the warmth of the evening, and oohed and ahhed at the changing leaves and the brightness of the moon.  For the parts of the walk where she didn’t need her hands to gesture as she talked, Aden held my hand.

It’s interesting how much growing up happens sometimes in conflicting little levels and not all at once.  There are so many ways in which Aden is still a little girl.  She’s not in a hurry to get older.  She doesn’t ask me for makeup or pierced ears.  She has no plans to move on from her stuffed animals or more childish toys.  And yet she’s getting more responsible and knows how to bake and can run errands to Target alone.  She can seem so adult to me one minute, and still my baby the next.  Both things make me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

At Target I had Aden simply point out to me which things (in a reasonable price range) she would be happy about finding under her pillow in the morning.  I had her pick out things Mona might like, too.  Then I had Aden turn her back so she couldn’t see specifically which things I was going to buy, and I made her walk ahead when I got to the checkout so she still couldn’t see.  She looked giddy on the walk home, because there is still some element of surprise to this new version of the tooth fairy game, but now she’s confident she will like what she gets.

I’m a little sad.  Quinn still has all his teeth, so I know I sill have years left of tooth fairy fun ahead, but Aden’s on the cusp of a much more grown up existence than she was just days ago and it’s hard not to see her progress as just a step toward moving away.  To have the tooth fairy illusion broken opens the door to a different understanding of the world.  I’m sure the end of Santa is next, but she will be ten this Christmas, and that seems about time, but it changes my life as well.

My job as her mom now will be to encourage her to see the magic where it really was all along.  The reality and wonder of the universe is better than fairies who take old teeth, and love of family is better than an imaginary man with a sleigh.  There is still an endless amount of magic to appreciate in the world, it’s just now that she’s older Aden will have to learn to discover much of it for herself rather than have it handed to her.

But I liked being Aden’s secret tooth fairy.  It was fun while it lasted.

The Tooth Fairy may have to just move in (Babble)

Mona has been losing baby teeth left and right lately, and showed me another loose one this morning.

This was Mona back in July with a mouth full of teeth:

Then suddenly four of them were loose at once and there was much wiggling of teeth going on for several weeks.  Then it seemed like every day for awhile she was handing me another tooth.  She lost one at choir (I think while waiting in line for the drinking fountain, although it’s much more exciting the way Mona tells it), and she lost one at school and someone in the office put it in a tiny treasure chest for her so she wouldn’t misplace it before she got home.

Then a she lost another tooth on top during dinner and was left with one tooth sitting by itself in front for a couple of days.  I really wanted a picture of that because it was particularly adorable, but I didn’t get the chance.  The morning of picture day at school Mona lost that tooth while getting dressed.  It’s looking pretty vacant there in her mouth at the moment, but you’d be amazed how little it affects her ability to munch on carrots.

So we’ve had lots of visits from the Tooth Fairy lately.  Best Tooth Fairy advice I ever got (in case you haven’t had the chance to do this yet in your own home and need ideas) is to put the tooth in a plastic baggie before putting it under the pillow.  Makes it very easy to find in the night.

I don’t know what other people currently do for Tooth Fairy gifts under the pillow.  I should ask around on the playground one of these days, but I suspect most people put money there.  I thought long and hard about what the Tooth Fairy should bring when Aden lost her first tooth because I knew it would set a precedent for many years to come.  She was five, and money just didn’t seem interesting enough, especially since she didn’t have a good concept of it.  I couldn’t imagine what she would do with a dollar if she found one under her pillow.  Anyway, I decided to go with little toys.  At the time Aden was heavily into all things Pokemon, so she would get little Pokemon keychains and figures and she liked the added thrill of not knowing for sure what she would get when she went to sleep.
 
I keep a box in my room of cute little toys (mostly Littlest Petshop things which are what both girls like best at the moment) just in case.  Which is good, because the night Mona lost her tooth at choir I had rehearsal, so I didn’t find out until I got in at 10 at night and there was a post-it note from Ian in the living room letting me know I needed to slip something under Mona’s pillow before coming to bed.  The funny thing is that I usually end up sticking the baggie with the tooth in it into my top dresser drawer, and now every morning I rummage through all these bags of teeth while looking for socks and underwear.  That’s not something I would have pictured myself doing before I had kids.

My children are very serious about the Tooth Fairy.  Mona sometimes holds onto her tooth for a few days, debating whether or not a new toy is better than an old tooth.  Sometimes I even let them keep the tooth and still get the prize, as long as they write a note to put under the pillow explaining the situation.  I ask Aden from time to time if she’d rather the Tooth Fairy start bringing her money, but she still likes the toys.

We’ve had a couple of dramatic moments when the missing tooth disappeared before it had a chance to go under a pillow.  Aden once lost a tooth on a trip to New York, and we thought it fell out of her luggage during a transfer at the Detroit airport.  I had Aden write a note to the Tooth Fairy, and the Tooth Fairy (whose handwriting looks strangely like mine) wrote her back to say all was well, she found the tooth in Detroit, and Aden could still have a prize.  Of course, Aden searched her luggage more thoroughly afterward and did find the tooth, and she wanted to know why the Tooth Fairy would return it.  I told her I had no idea, and did we really want to speculate on what was reasonable behavior from someone who collected other people’s teeth?  Aden knows better than to look a gift fairy in the mouth and let it go.

I like the Tooth Fairy ritual.   It’s one of the few things about parenting that is pretty much the way I imagined it back when I tried to picture what it would be like to have kids.  Most of parenting is nothing like I imagined.  Parenting for real rather than in theory is just more of everything than I expected.  It’s harder and easier and better and worse than I could have known.  But a tooth under a pillow?  It’s just as weird and fun as it was when I was a kid hoping to find a quarter in its place the next morning.  (I just hope Mona manages to keep a few in her head so that she’s not gumming her food by Thanksgiving.)