Surviving the Toothfairy

I thought about throwing up a spoiler alert for this post, but then I realized, if you're old enough to peruse blogs for leisurely reading, then you're probably old enough to handle what I'm about to disclose, making a spoiler alert unnecessary.

If that's not the case, I blame your mother.

And you should too.

Tayler lost a tooth yesterday.

I don't know who started the whole business of the tooth fairy, but it's one I could I do without.

Just for the record, at our house the going rate for a tooth is a dollar.  The end.  No books and toothbrushes and five or even twenty dollar bills.  I think that's insane.  Do you realize how many teeth your children are going to lose?  And that's the standard you're going to hold?

If you can do that, all the more power to you, sister.

As it goes, the tooth fairy often forgets at our house.

And the toothless child will come to me in the morning, rubbing sleep out of their eyes, and say something to the affect that the tooth fairy never came.

And then I reply with, "I'm sure she came!  Let's go look."  And somewhere between where ever I'm standing and their bedroom I find an excuse to visit my purse, like, I suddenly desperately need chapstick.  I detour to my purse, put on chapstick, slip a dollar into my palm, and head to the bedroom.

I rustle pillows around, and look under blankets and then, "oh here it is, it just fell on the floor."

I learned this from my dad (Dick), though it didn't occur to me that it had gone down like that until I was a parent and "the tooth fairy didn't come," and suddenly a lightbulb went off in my head and things became very clear.  And in that moment I knew exactly how to handle it because I knew I had never suspected otherwise as a child.

It works every time.

So yesterday Tayler lost a tooth.

So this happened.

Because that's the level that my life has come to, setting an alarm to remind me that the tooth fairy needs to make a visit.  Usually I set the alarm for 10:00 or 10:30 at night, but exhaustion had sunk into the very depths of my soul last night. If I hadn't known better I would have suspected that I'd been drugged, I was so drained and foggy. So I gave myself a break and set the alarm for the morning for right before I would leave to my math class.

Just as I was finishing my makeup the alarm went off on my phone, reminding me that I had a very important parental duty to attend to before I left the house (seriously, who made this toot fairy act up?  And WHY?) so I grabbed a dollar and went to the bedroom that Tayler and Cali share.

We all keep our bedroom doors closed, all of the time, to keep the dogs out.  And in the case of the kids, to keep them from eating whatever hasn't been put away.  Which is a lot.  The issue I was facing on this morning is that Tayler and Cali have a bit of a broken doorknob and it takes a few turns to get it to open.

As quietly as I could muster I wrestled with that doorknob, hearing every turn and moan that it made, and every bump of the door on the door frame as I struggled with it.

Right then I formed a back up plan.  If they wake up I'll just tell them I'm checking on them before I leave, give them hugs in their beds, and quickly do a swap tooth for dollar as I wrap my arms around Tayler.

I got the door open and peered into the room.

They were still dead asleep.

Tayler and Cali sleep on the other side of the room from where the door is so I tentatively stepped into the room and in doing so stepped on something that made a rather loud rustle.  The floor of their room was completely covered with toys, clothes, books, blankets, and what have you.  I guess I know what we're doing tonight.  I tried to walk across the room, dodging a small table, without making any noise by what I was walking on, and with out killing myself.

One step on a stray lego and it would be all over with.

I made it to Tayler's bed, but realized I had another obstacle ahead of me.  I've taken the girls' bunkbed apart to refinish it.  It's currently sitting in pieces in multiple stages of being painted in the basement.  The girls are sleeping on their mattresses on the floor.  Tayler's mattress is pushed up into the corner of the wall, going down the length of one wall, while Cali's is pushed right up next to Tayler's, going down the length of the other wall, creating an L shape.  But what this has done is left me with no obvious access to the top of Tayler's mattress where her head and pillows, and thus tooth, are.  There are walls and Cali and her mattress on every side.

My only option is to kneel on the side of Tayler's mattress and lean over her as I reach up to her pillows.

You have got to be kidding me.

Go for the hug approach, I think as I kneel down onto the bed.

But she doesn't move.

I lean over her and take my hands on either side of her stack of pillows.  She has three pillows under head and I'm not sure which layer she put the tooth under, and I'm hoping and praying that she listened to me and put it in a baggie to make it a little easier to find.

I decide to start with the top layer and work my way down.

I put my hands on either side of the pillows and run them under the pillow toward the middle, practically face to face with sleeping Tayler as I'm bent over her to accomplish this.

Good thing I brushed my teeth.

And I then I feel it.

I'm not sure what it is though.  But it has to be it.  So I grab it and leave the dollar in its place.

I'm still not in the clear.  I get my hands out from under the pillow and push off the mattress to get myself up and off.

And I stand there, frozen.

But she's still asleep.

I turn and take the death walk over piles of stuff back around the table and out the door.

I feel like my greatest success of the day happened at 6:30 this morning.

Out in the hallway, after the door is closed again, I look at what's in my hand.

"To the Tooth Fairy.  From Tayler." With her address and the tooth taped into the corner.

And suddenly I feel a little guilty that I didn't have a book or a toothbrush or even a five dollar bill to put under her pillow.

My greatest success of the day has now become a huge guilt trip.

And I can't put enough emphasis into the thought, who even made the tooth fairy an issue to begin with??