The tooth fairy wields a big stick

• By Alison
• 8 March, 2010
• 5 Comments

Miss Comic Relief lost her second tooth this week. She is now sporting a big gap on the bottom of her mouth and she loves pushing her tongue through it. It’s going to take me some time to get used to it. The next two teeth are the ones that make the most difference to the face. I am so used to how Miss Trouble Pants looks with her massive beaver teeth (poor child!) that it’s always a surprise to look at old photographs.

Miss Comic Relief has picture perfect symmetrical teeth. She always has. They are small and perfectly formed, even at top and bottom. Miss Trouble Pants on the other hand started off with an extra baby tooth that made her teeth look misaligned, and they seemed larger to begin with. Now that her adult teeth are coming in (she has 7 of them) they are already fighting for space. In fact – at the age of 8 she’s already seen an orthodontist, as referred by the dentist. They are planning to realign her bottom jaw when she’s 10, as her overbite is 10mm.

But this isn’t about her, it’s about that magical creature who – for some unfathomable reason – wants to collect those little chunks of enamel with fragments of dried blood still caught in the stem of the tooth.

All I remember from my own childhood was that the tooth fairy would come during the night and switch the tooth for a coin. I can’t even remember the going rate. I figured that this would be acceptable for my own children.

But apparently not.

My mother-in-law and various other sources had already furnished my girls with books about the tooth fairy. For one thing – these books contradict each other. Is there one tooth fairy, or many? And for a second – one of the books (which also came with its own little velvet bag for holding the tooth) tells the story of a relationship by letters between the child and fairy.

That book mentions that the fairies use the teeth to build their cities – which grosses me out in some ways. I know that they’d make nice white stones, but still – they are teeth! Or perhaps it’s something like this –>

The idea of the tooth fairy brigade getting around with tooth encrusted jewellery really opens up a new fear – is there a black market for teeth? Are we likely to be mugged in an inky dark alley at some point?

A fairy with a baseball bat could be a very scary proposition.

Or am I projecting totally irrational and human characteristics on a mythical creature?

Back to the story. Miss Trouble Pants was 2 years old when she was given that book. So wisely – I took the small velvet bag and put it somewhere safe. I return it to that safe place after each use.

Do you think I could find the damn thing when Miss Comic Relief’s first tooth fell out? Not a chance.

I found an alternate bag for her to use – a small bag that some earrings had come in. In fact, it’s a far better bag than the velvet one, since that lasted precisely 3 teeth before it completely fell apart anyway.

And then came the next big task. The letter to the tooth fairy.

Because of the book, Miss Trouble Pants likes to write letters to the tooth fairy and she receive them in return. Tiny weeny little letters that I print out and cut to size. One day she asked for a photo, and that was an extra challenge. I googled high and low to find an image of  the tooth fairy that wasn’t comical or sexual (amazingly, that was incredibly difficult!). Finally I found one and printed it out, covered it in contact, and popped it in with the letter.

Miss Comic Relief went straight in at the jugular. She wanted a photo of the tooth fairy too.

Now here is the difficult part. Do we make it the same tooth fairy? Or do they have their own unique tooth fairies? I wasn’t sure I could come up with a second image that matched the first one.

In the end, I didn’t try and match it. I found a photo that looked sweet and used that. We decided that the tooth fairies would be different ones so that this would be a totally new experience, new territory.

So here, without further ado, is the photo of our newest tooth fairy (lifted from somewhere on the internet).

She was very well received by Miss Comic Relief. 

But what is she wearing around her neck? God I hope it’s not teeth!