JJ's teacher called me from school yesterday to say my child had knocked her two top front teeth out on a see-saw; I arrived to find her sobbing in the teacher's lap, an ice-cube pressed to her gums and her two little teeth in an envelope. It wrings my heart just writing about it... she calmed down once I'd got her home and cuddled up on my bed with a few stories, but didn't want anybody to see her; she was worried that she looked awful and couldn't talk properly. The dentist helped a lot by showing her the x-ray on which the new teeth were clearly visible, just waiting to come out. And by giving her a balloon, which I followed up with a visit to the toy shop. So all in all she was feeling much better by bedtime, and even more so this morning when she found the Tooth Fairy's letter and double dose of coins. She actually *asked* to go to school, which doesn't happen much at the moment.
But. My poor baby is far less winsome than she was yesterday morning. A gangly kid with a huge gap in the front of her mouth who talks funny is, let's face it, far less appealing than her cherubic peers, and she is not going to find quite such easy acceptance from the world for a while. Maybe never again. Sekkie, meanwhile, is at the height of her three-year-old charm, able to melt hearts just by putting her little chin in her hands and looking at people. She has taken to bringing me rolled-out bits of paper wrapped in sticky tape and saying "Here mama, here's a sceletope for you." I sometimes wonder whether she gets the word wrong deliberately because she knows we think it's cute.
JJ has been concentrating her gift-giving on the fairies, with gratifying results (for her). The Sleep Fairy, who's made a reappearance in our lives, has been outfitted with an entire wardrobe made of tinfoil and left on the plants outside overnight: skirts, ponchos, shoes, hats, a wand cover and several purses. This means Dad and I have to remember to go outside every night and collect them, leaving appropriate thank-you notes behind. Being a fairy is hard work.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The tooth fairy has a lot to answer for
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3 comments:
Poor JJ - maybe if some of the other kids at school get / have loose teeth, it'll be easier.
As a kid, I always left things for the fairies, including chocolate. I always received thank-you notes for the blankets and toys - not the chocolate. The mystery was solved when, a few years ago, I discovered that my brother had collected chocolate from the garden for years- figuring that the fairies had left it for him!
Oh, poor thing! I knocked out all 4 my front teeth when I was about 2 or 3 (my mother is hazy about these things). My adult teeth seemed to benefit from having space, or at least that's what the dentist told me; apparently I had the straightest teeth anyone had ever seen. So that's some small compensation.
The losing of infant teeth is obviously more common than I thought - all sorts of ppl have told me about similar incidents in the past couple of days. And yes, Jesse, it does help a bit to think her new teeth may come out straighter without the competition :-)
JJ enjoyed her day of celebrity at school yesterday, anyway. And yet more stuff made for the sleep fairy today -- it's nice to think I'm joining a generation-spanning conspiracy of parents keeping the fairies alive :-)
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