The Tooth Fairy on Tour

Tamsin - 19 Jul 18

‘MY TOOTH’ yells Mitch at the top of his voice, ‘FINALLY’.  We all erupt into cheers and whoops.  The Spanish couples nearest to us on the beach, smoking desultorily whilst sunning themselves, look over at us vaguely alarmed at such shouting for no apparent reason. They soon go back to their Camel Lights though and adjust their teeny tiny bikini bottoms with a shrug – their suspicions that English people are total weirdos confirmed.

Of all of the disgusting elements of having kids the wobbling teeth are amongst the worst.  It properly grosses me out seeing those teeny tiny white teeth being pushed about by their tongues.  Hanging on by a thread.  Tears at mealtimes when they pronounce themselves utterly incapable of eating dinner because ‘my tooth is too wobbly’.  Never too wobbly to eat some bloody cake though is it kids, huh?!  Hysterics at teeth cleaning time that the toothbrush made it bleed a bit.   I suppose that mixes it up a little in that normally teeth cleaning time is accompanied by a cacophony of complaints that the toothpaste is ‘too minty’ or that they’ve been gobbed on by their sibling before the daily argument about how they have only had their toothbrushes in their mouths for 15 seconds, at a generous estimate, and that it is in no way possible to clean teeth in that time.  

The time between a tooth first becoming wobbly and it falling out is bloody interminable.  Seriously, I don’t think there has been any time in the last 5 years when my boys haven’t had at least one tooth wobbly.   One thing though seems guaranteed to make them finally fall out – going on holiday.  Now I’m willing to concede that, as a family, we do travel more than most but we are at home wayyyyyy more than we are away yet the boys WITHOUT FAIL lose a tooth on holiday.

Lots of things are a LOT better on holiday.  The wine is cheaper, the sun is shinier, there’s swimming opportunities and it’s acceptable to eat and drink whatever you want whenever you want it.  Some things are a LOT worse though on holiday.  Puking is one of them – ain’t nobody likes being poorly away from home.  Maintaining a routine for kids whilst you are travelling is so much harder than at home and adhering to their much cherished and comforting family traditions is difficult without the necessary accessories.

Every family has their own rituals and stories surrounding teeth falling out.  Most families in the UK, I think, pedal the myth of the Tooth Fairy.  In our house the Tooth Fairy is, apparently, a boy – as boy tooth fairies take care of boy humans and girl tooth fairies for girls.  My boys say they don’t know what the Tooth Fairy looks like but they know FOR SURE that they bring money that is tiny (otherwise how could they fly with it – durr) and then use their magic to grow the money to normal size when they leave it.  They say they don’t know how the tooth fairy knows when a tooth is ready for collection. 

Whilst it’s traditional to leave the tooth under the pillow we have eschewed that practice on the grounds that it’s inherently a bad idea to have a tiny white tooth the size of a large breadcrumb underneath the wriggly heads of sleeping children.  The chances of finding the bastard tooth under a pillow, in the dark, without waking up the little blighters and thus shattering their childhood innocence and increasing the chances of them growing up to be actual bona fide psychopaths with teeth fetishes are slim at best.   So we have a special little tin – WITH A LID – that the tooth can be put in.

The lid element is important.  When I was a little girl we lived next door but one to the kindest, most lovely lady in the world ever.   Known to all and sundry as Aunty Di she fostered hundreds of children and was a surrogate mum to all of us in the neighbourhood.  You never knew when new kids would arrive at her house and become our playmates, some for mere hours, some she adopted and they became some of our best friends.  There could be a knock on our door in the middle of the night asking if she could borrow our pyjamas as a little girl our age had turned up with literally no clothes.  She was inspirational.  And she was the worlds leading expert at pulling out wobbly teeth.  It didn’t seem weird at the time, but with hindsight it was a little odd, but once your tooth was wobbly enough you got sent round to Aunty Di’s for her to pull out your tooth.  You would perch on one of her kitchen stools, surrounding by an audience of however many foster children she happened to have at the time and anyone else who was playing out and had seen you go round pronouncing loudly that it was tooth time (the early 80s clearly not a massive range of other entertainment options for kids, I remember it being extremely exciting to watch a tooth pulling.  Take that Minecraft), open wide and YANK – out it came.  The tooth would be placed ceremoniously into her special tooth pot.  All the other kids would cheer and you were sent on your merry way with the little pot proudly held aloft to show your parents when you got home and for them to arrange suitable recompense (and presumably think thank fuck she will stop whinging at every mealtime about the bastard wobbler).

Except, one time, I was walking home with the tooth pot – it was brown and like an egg cup.  Come to think of it, it probably was an egg cup.  Not a special tooth pot.  Don’t shatter my childhood illusions – our drive was steep down to our 70s semi and I have always been clumsy to the extreme.  I tripped.  I dropped the special tooth pot (not the brown egg cup.  Shut up) and my little tooth flew out.  NEVER TO BE FOUND AGAIN.  I cried.  We all looked.  I cried some more.  We looked more.  I wrote a tearful missive to the Tooth Fairy to explain what had happened.  My mum still has the letter, it’s hilarious.  It worked and I got my shiny coin.  Admittedly, it says a lot about the overall happiness and spoilt privilege of my childhood that I remember this incident as being traumatic and to this day am wary enough to make sure that my kids have a tooth pot with a lid.  And no, we are not allowed to call it an old sweetie tin, thank you very much, it is OUR SPECIAL TOOTH POT.

But when we are on holiday we don’t have the special tooth pot.  Although to be fair with the frequency of foreign teeth fallings out I should start packing it in hand luggage maybe.  Instead we’ve made do with the lid of some suncream or a shot glass with I heart Amsterdam written on it.  The Tooth Fairy apparently isn’t receptacle biased.  

All of these are true stories about how and where my children have lost teeth. 

A few years ago we started the tradition of having a Mummy and boys mini-break in the summer holidays.  A little adventure while Daddy was working.  Last summer we hired a cottage in North Wales for a few nights.  The first time we had taken our new puppy away.  I am not kidding you, within 15 minutes of us arriving – before I’d even unloaded the car Corey had managed to kick Mitch in the face BY ACCIDENT (to be fair he does have ADHD and Dyspraxia and is in limited control of his flailing limbs at any one time – but come on) with sufficient force for it to have half knocked out a hitherto not at all wobbly front tooth.  Cue blood everywhere, Mitch being a total drama queen screaming ‘my tooth, my tooth’, Corey crying as he was in trouble, me sitting on Mitch’s chest to keep him still so I could yank out the hanging off tooth and wondering why I’d foolishly only packed one bottle of wine.  We calmed down, the boys went to bed, the welsh tooth fairy felt rejuvenated by a bottle of chardonnay and left a very generous £5 to compensate for the trauma.  The second night of the holiday – the boys went off to bed then Mitch reappeared in the lounge holding a second tooth aloft.  The kick had loosened the tooth next to it too.  We carefully placed it in a mug with a welsh dragon on next to the bed.  Half an hour later I realised I had zero cash in my purse.  Zilch.  So had to spend half an hour with my iPhone torch in the pitch black of the welsh countryside scrabbling round the floor of my car to see if any of my emergency parking money could be found.  Mitch woke up to 74p in the mug but seemed happy with the explanation that if two come out close together you get less on the second time.  

We went glamping in rural Spain – on the third night Corey swallowed his tooth.  And was then inconsolable that the Spanish tooth fairy wouldn’t come because he’d eaten his tooth.  In Barbados both boys lost a tooth within a couple of days of each other.   Mitch in particular though is canny with money – the little sod had worked out that he could milk the exchange rate and get more than he would at home.  But mummy 2 Euros is less than 2 pounds isn’t it.  I think the tooth fairy here leaves 3 Euros.  And I’d prefer American Dollars to Bajan because they buy more.  Oh really.  

We’ve spent years encouraging Corey to overcome his fear of water and swimming – in a lovely hotel in Austria we were in the pool playing a jumping in game with them.  It’s a big deal for him to pluck up the courage to jump in and is only successful maybe half the time.  He’d been growing in confidence and was gradually jumping into water deeper than his knees (by ‘jump’ I mean kind of slide reluctantly into very shallow water ensuring his face doesn’t touch the water at any point).  Lots of parental whooping and encouragement – he does his biggest jump yet, he goes in the water, oh shit his head is going under water – we all panic because that never ends well.  (Not in a drowning type scenario – he can swim – sort of sideways in a stroke unknown to any other living being – but in him having a proper spectrum meltdown because water has been on his face).  He bobs up sobbing before his face has even come out of the water, absolutely inconsolable – I sit on the side with him calming him down then he says he’s not crying because he got wet – he’s crying because his tooth fell out mid jump and is somewhere in the swimming pool.  Not sure if you’ve ever considered how hard a baby tooth is to find in a swimming pool?  No? Neither had I.  The answer is ‘impossible to find’.  It also makes me feel a bit vommy now whenever I am in any swimming pool that there maybe tiny human teeth floating around in there (barf). 

What do you even do with the teeth anyway?  The first tooth that they lose you can’t imagine ever parting with.  it’s so tiny.  It’s a rite of passage, your baby is no longer a baby.  I have a special sappy pot for it.  But then they lose loads and the pot is full and you get a sinking feeling that keeping human teeth is akin to something in a fairy tale where a wicked witch makes a necklace of teeth and eats children.  Throwing them away though?  That’s well harsh.  Those little teeth are part of your flesh and blood.  They’re precious no?  I still shove them all in the pot. I know have no clue which belongs to which child and I think that there’s actually one wrapped in a Burger King napkin in my purse that one of the boys lost in America.  

I am pretty much convinced that at nearly 8 and 10 my boys don’t believe in any way shape or form in the tooth fairy.  Not that they’d say that for fear of missing out on the dough mind you.  When I was writing this I got to wondering if the tooth fairy is a global story or not and where it came from.  Because the idea of a strange being coming into your home in the night and essentially buying your teeth is pretty weird.  Turns out that my extensive tooth based research says that the teeth mythology varies massively.  In England in the Middle Ages children were instructed to burn their baby teeth in order to save them from hardship in the after life.   The Vikings paid children for their teeth and wore necklaces hung with children’s teeth into battle as good luck talismans.  In Asia they throw the tooth onto the roof or into a space between the floor and shout a request for the tooth to be replaced with a tooth from a mouse.  Now that’s pretty gross, but the logic behind is that the teeth of mice grow strongly for the entirety of their lives and by throwing the tooth either up or down, depending on where it is in your mouth, means the tooth will grow either straight up or straight down. In Spain, Italy, France and Latin America they believe in ‘El Ratoncito Perez’ which is a little mouse (pictured wearing a rather dapper suit) who takes the tooth in return for money.   I must say I like the idea of El Ratoncito Perez more than the ubiquitous Disney-fied fairy. 

We go on holiday to Wales in 2 weeks.  Mitch has already told me this morning that he thinks his wobbly tooth will be ‘ripe enough to fall out on holiday Mummy, which is cool because you get more money on holiday’.  I best remember to pack some change.  And more than one bottle of wine in case it’s one of our more traumatic tooth loss occasions!! 

Tamsin

Hi - I'm a mum of two boys living in Manchester. I was a lawyer pre-kids and now work with the families of prisoners. I love to travel, cook, read, drink wine and my burning ambition is to be a writer. And raise healthy, happy kids.

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