Our 5-year-old twin daughter, Cora, lost her first baby tooth tonight! It had been loose for quite some time, since June 12, according to my Facebook post from the morning she first told us it was loose. We had just assumed that she was sort of afraid to lose it or especially to pull it, but this evening she said to us (while standing in the corner for having been too wild and noisy after dinner) that she thought her tooth might come out tonight. Hans and I both took a look and saw that the tooth could go completely horizontal, yet was still attached. We agreed that if she wanted to try to get it out tonight, she should be the one to do so. That way if there was any pain she'd be the one in control. In my family the story always was, but I don't think we ever really did it, that someone would tie a string around the tooth and around a doorknob to an open door and then would slam the door. Ouch! I definitely didn't want to force anything painful on her, especially for this first tooth.
She was such a brave girl and just sat on the sofa with some tissues to soak up the blood that it produced as she worked on it. I will admit that even though I was sitting right next to her, I didn't really want to watch that carefully. I'm OK with my own blood, but seeing other people's blood has made me queasy in the past. Side note: in college when I was an architecture (architorture) student at Georgia Tech, one of the many nights that most of us spent in the studio, as it approached morning (probably about 5 a.m.), a fellow student got off track when slicing some paper with an Exacto knife and almost sliced off the ends of three of his fingers. There was a TON of blood and only one other student there besides the wounded one and myself. Thankfully she had a car, so she and I helped him get cleaned up as best we could and she drove him to a local clinic. I, however, sat down at my drafting table and put my head down on the table. I guess that shows that I can be strong in the moment of need, but might need to recover afterward.
Anyway, back to Cora's tooth. So, there we sat on the sofa as she tugged and twisted on her tooth, the lower right incisor. She was making repetitive motions, so I wasn't 100% sure that she'd pulled it when she actually got it out. She was so excited and proud of what she'd done! Hans cleaned up the tooth and put it in a tiny plastic bag so she could put it in the pocket on her Tooth Fairy pillow. She was also delighted to call all of her grandparents and let them know the good news.
As I write this, the Tooth Fairy has already come to exchange the tooth for a bit of money. While we're on the topic, how much money did you get from the Tooth Fairy and how much money did/will your children get? I got one dollar per tooth except for the four molars I had to have surgically pulled to make space in my tiny mouth (some would disagree with that!), when I got ten dollars for the four teeth. Hans and I talked about how much to give her and finally settled on five dollars, at least for the first tooth. Someone suggested for future teeth giving each kid a random amount of bills and change so that they have to add up how much money the Tooth Fairy brought. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this, so please share. Cora already has a second loose tooth and it won't be long before Greta has some, too, that then there's Franklin and Carlton, so we're going to have plenty of visits from the Tooth Fairy over the next decade or so.
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I started off giving the kids something unique -- a silver dollar. Not a Sacajawea gold dollar, but a real silver dollar. The banks still carried them 15 or so years ago, so I got a roll and gave one for each tooth. I eventually had to buy a second roll, and by that time, had to go with the Sacajawea coins. By then, the kids were quite a bit older, and were skeptical of the tooth fairy anyways.
My son got to the point where he realized how unusual the dollar coins were and wouldn't spend them for a long, long time! He'd be scraping for money and counting pennies, but wouldn't spend his coin!
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