Sadly this is my second time posting this. I had just finished adding captions when I added a picture from my phone and poof - like magic I lost all my work. Technology has made documenting the passage of time much easier thus providing an opportunity to provide details much more than our ancestors of old, but it is clearly not without limits. On to the purpose of the post...
A few weeks ago now Jari sent me this picture:
We were all a little surprised to see she had a tooth coming in. She had been telling us she had a loose tooth for a while and I agreed it was loose but not enough to put out. One look at this picture and I could see a large portion of my income going to some lucky orthodontist somewhere in the future...
She was quite ready to have the tooth come out and let me put some floss on it.
Success!
I remember losing my teeth at home - all the drama involved. Perhaps I am not remembering correctly but it seemed like dad had to give me a heart to heart talk about manning up and then he ended up being the one to pull my teeth. So I am more than proud of Charlotte for being willing to 1) pull on the tooth herself and 2) letting me just pull it out.
That night I went to work (kids were sleeping as was Jari, might as well go to work right? Problems a night shift worker would only understand....) and around 4:00 am I realized I had forgotten to stop by and make the switch! So I ran home hoping I had a dollar. Luckily, I did.
Now this is NOT Charlotte's first reaction to finding the money the tooth fairy left behind. That morning, as I sat on the couch and she came out to talk to me she said something that shocked me. "Um, Dad...? I... Can I say something? I think... YOU are the tooth fairy!" I was so unprepared for this. How did childhood get spoiled that quick? I made the switch while she was a sleeping?!?! I simply asked her why she thought that and she proceeded to give me a list of reasons she had come up with the night before while falling asleep:
"1) It seems to me that the tooth fairy would give coins like maybe 15 cents. I don't think the tooth fairy would give a dollar like paper money.
2) How could the tooth fairy even get inside? The front door is locked...
3) Mom told me pixie dust is not real. So if it is not real, that means there are no fairies, and if there are no fairies, then there cannot be a tooth fairy.
Quick side note here. Charlotte's character is an interesting mixture of both trust in what she is told, imagination, and deep thought and logic. A recent example of this stems from her watching Hotel Transylvania on a flight home to see family right after spending some play time a young girl from church who told her she was a vampire due to her fangs (canine teeth). This young girl licked Charlotte and since that time she has been convinced she too is a vampire. After becoming a vampire herself, she has been asking Jari to make her this potion to turn her into a bat. Once in possession of said potion she has requested that Jari throw her off the building as she is sure she will turn into a bat and fly. Jari has tried over and over again to explain that there is no purple potion that can turn her into a bat so to help us see it can work she wrote down the instructions:
On with the reasons:
"4) My friend Rain from school said she saw her daddy pretending to be the tooth fairy so the tooth fairy is just your dad."
Side note #2. Rain's mom often talks with Jari on the way to Charlotte's school and told her that the tooth fairy got a little tipsy a few days in a row and forgot to get the tooth so mama upped the price of the tooth (to get him out of the dog house). Final price? $60! Crazy!
"5) In our family we don't get money for just doing nothing, we have to do chores. So why would I get money without doing chores?
After her proof, I could not exactly lie, so I committed her to secrecy so as to keep the thrill alive for her sister. Too bad she still expects money.
We tried to give the other tooth a go. While it did not come out she still demonstrated great courage by pulling on her own tooth.
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