Tooth Duped Fairy

There is a long-standing tradition in the world of children which customarily requires turning over your baby teeth to some mystical fairy. If that is not creepy enough, this same entity is to somehow enter your room while you are sleeping, dig around UNDER your pillow, and leave you some cash in exchange for your bloody stump of a tooth.

Now I enjoyed this tradition as a kid but sadly I was born in the days when a quarter was the going rate for a tooth. Maybe at the end of the cycle it was closer to 50 cents a tooth but never approaching the cash that is thrown around today. Now the ‘Tooth Fairy’ union must have negotiated a pretty sweet deal, because kid’s now might receive as much as $5, $10, and even $20 per tooth!

Talk about inflation – no wonder stuff costs so much, it’s the Fairy’s fault. Our kid was somewhere around the $1 a tooth range. She had a little velveteen bag which she would deposit the recently evicted tooth. It was our job to make sure the fairy would have access to the bag, take the tooth for posterity, and then leave the loot in the bag and place it back under the pillow.

Despite this process working very well for most of our daughter’s tooth transition to a mouthful of adult teeth, unbeknownst to us there was a debate raging at school. Some of the kids had the audacity to suggest that PARENTS are the ones who are actually leaving the money. In fact there are really no fairies at all – can you believe that?

In any case, our kid secretly vowed to conduct an experiment. The very next tooth to become loose, she simply placed her ‘dental deposit’ in the small bag under her pillow and TOLD NOT A SOUL.. Sure enough morning came and she excitedly dove under her pillow to find NOTHING had changed. We had been nabbed red handed without ever laying a hand on that tricky tooth at all. That obviously ended the need for the tradition as our toothless kid had duped us but good. The moral of the story is: ‘Whenever anybody or anything gives you cash for stuff that falls out of your body – take it, with or without your teeth – and keep your MOUTH SHUT!’