Comments (4)

By Mom Unplugged, October 16, 2007 9:13 pm

It’s not easy being the Tooth Fairy. Especially when the 7 year-old who is shedding teeth like the cats shed fur is a light, light sleeper. Always has been. Ever since she was a baby.

My mother and I used to tiptoe into her room before going to bed ourselves, “just to peep.” We would be oh so quiet, but somehow she always knew we were there and the eyelids would suddenly pop open like the vampire’s did in the 1979 miniseries version of Steven King’s Salem’s Lot (back when I lived with a TV).

We would run screaming from the room (well, figuratively screaming) knowing that she would be awake for hours. It was truly the stuff of nightmares.

Now, it is worse. It is so stressful realizing that the Tooth Fairy must collect the teeny tiny tooth that inevitably ends up buried somewhere deep under the pillow and leave something…all without causing those eyes to pop open.

I always oversee the placement of the tooth in an easily reachable position, but by the time the Tooth Fairy arrives, it is always pushed way under the pillow which is somehow covered with her entire body at that particular moment in time.

While we were away on vacation this summer, the kids slept together on an air mattress on my Dad’s living room floor. His house is small, so we also used that room to store our suitcases and ever-expanding collection of “stuff.”

My daughter decided to lose two teeth while we were away and each time, the Tooth Fairy failed to ensure that a path was cleared between the door and the pillow. There is nothing like tripping and stumbling through a minefield of invisible objects in the dark when one is trying to be discreet.

Oh, and then there was that time that THE TOOTH FAIRY FORGOT TO COME. This scenario figures prominently in parental nightmares and is one of my best Mom of the Year Award moments (ranking right up there with the time I turned my back and found the baby sucking the toilet brush).

It was about 6 AM and my sweet dream was rudely interrupted by my daughter flying into the room wailing: “She didn’t come!!!” My eyes suddenly popped open like my daughter’s (or the vampire’s) and I sat bolt upright in bed. “Oh s__t!!!” was my first thought of the day, and I am really not a person who is easily given to uttering profanities.

Well, I quickly explained that:

“The tooth must not have been properly placed under the pillow and since the Tooth Fairy is small, you know, it is very difficult for her to reach a tooth that is not properly placed, of course the Tooth Fairy can come in the daytime under such extreme circumstances, in fact she is probably flitting about the house in great distress as we speak simply waiting for us to move the tooth to an easier location.” Blah blah blah….

I surely do not need to tell you that the Tooth Fairy made an immediate pick-up and drop-off as soon as my daughter’s back was turned.

And then there was the time that my daughter wrote this note to the Tooth Fairy and left it under her pillow with a tooth (all her own precious idea):

Translation:

“Dear Tooth Fairy,
Thank you for leaving a little treat for children when they “loose” a tooth.
Love,
(name) ”

I guess that makes it all worthwhile.