Saturday, Olivia was loitering in my room while I was getting ready to go out to a business dinner with Dallas.
Lately, she has become far more interested in make up and jewelry and I just don't have the heart to inform her that I was not gifted with the girlie girl genes. Why should I stress her out by telling her that she is likely to struggle accessorizing or finding the will to do her hair every morning? Why burst that bubble?
Anyway, Liv was clearly looking for some mother/daughter bonding time which under normal circumstances, I'm happy to indulge. Saturday was a different matter entirely. I had cleaned like a maniac for most of the day and left late in the afternoon to finish shopping for Father's Day. I got home minutes before five in the afternoon, with both kids in tow and less than an hour to get showered, dressed and primped. If hair is part of the equation, an hour is not enough time. If excessive humidity is part of the picture, an hour is not enough time. If the dry cleaners is closed before you pick up your clothes, an hour IS NOT ENOUGH TIME!
So, I was the tiniest bit stressed out and Olivia was needy. Trying to do my best to avoid the "Worst Parent of The Year" award, I asked if she would help me pick out my jewelry. This thrilled her to no end and just as I was about to give myself a congratulatory pat on the back, Olivia gasped, walked into the bathroom, pointed her finger at me and said, "YOU are the tooth fairy!"
You know those moments as a parent when you are at a complete loss as to how to handle a situation? Yeah, that was me.
She looked at me, wide-eyed and incredulous. In her hand was the small treasure box that I had given her six times previously, into which she had put a newly extracted tooth. She would slide it under her pillow and in the morning, it was magically replaced with a dollar bill. She found the damn thing in my jewelry box, full of all six of her baby teeth.
As her expectant face stared into my own, I had several fantastical lies run through my head:
1. The tooth fairy left it behind because I was so sad when she took your teeth away.
Or
2. I bought the teeth back from the tooth fairy so I could keep them for your baby book.
Or
3. The tooth fairy has a nasty coke habit and needed to sell the teeth to feed her addiction.
As it turned out, I just couldn't lie to her. She knew. I could tell by her face that anything other than the truth would have been a breach of trust between us.
"You're right," I conceded, "I'm the tooth fairy."
She smiled and said, I KNEW it!"
As I witnessed her processing the information, as evidenced by her furrowed brow and faraway look, I held my breath waiting for the last few bits of little girl innocence to fly away as she connected the dots to Santa and the Easter Bunny. But instead, she surprised me by asking that I leave Junie B books rather than dollar bills the next time she lost a tooth.
Clever, enterprising girl.
And then she walked back to my jewelry box and picked out the perfect earrings to go with my outfit.
3 comments:
Silly woman- don't you know that the tooth fairy can't transport teeth? It takes WAY too much energy. So she flies them to the drawer and I store them. If she tried to take them back to fairyland, she'd use up all of her fairy dust, and maybe die. And that would be very sad now, wouldn't it?
Oh what a good mother I am- just enough guilt to make them NEVER question again! (insert evil laughter here)
She's her Mama's girl!! LOL
Awww, closer to teenagerhood, if even a tiny bit. Tempus fugit. But very enterprising indeed. Good for her! :-)
But, looking back on my own childhood, I foresaw this problem and found a way to avoid it. We left a note with the tooth asking if Mumma could please keep the lost tooth as a memento for their baby book. By the 3rd or 4th tooth lost (and therefore, note left) they didn't question the tooth being left behind because the tooth fairy had 'learned' she was to leave it behind.
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