As you may recall from yesterday’spost, my daughter had her tooth pulled out by the dentist which left us with one very excited six-year-old, and two parents wondering for the first time just what was expected of the tooth fairy. When I was a kid the tooth fairy left me a quarter. Apparently my wife received candy under her pillow from the tooth fairy, because the tooth fairy at her house wanted more teeth to fall out I guess. But obviously quarters are not the current inflated rate for teeth, and Ruby doesn’t even really like candy all that much, so these didn’t seem like things the tooth fairy was going to bring to her.
Now, it seemed to us parents that one dollar was a good inflated amount for a reasonable tooth fairy to bring, but was that really true. I mean, I am not the tooth fairy, so I don’t know what she brings to modern kids. We asked around and were terrified to discover that some kids got as much as ten dollars per tooth, and we even heard rumors of some kids that got a twenty. This seemed like a lot of money. Kids have twenty baby teeth, so at $20 a pop, that’s $400 for teeth! What is my six-year-old going to do with $400?! No, we needed to do more research.
Luckily we came upon this article, laying out how much kids got, on average, for a lost tooth, and it was broken out by region. Obviously different areas of the country have different costs of living, and the tooth fairy knows this. But in the Northeast, where we live, the average haul per tooth is sitting high at $4.10. So what this means is most kids get a five, and a few get a little less. And yes, I’m sure others get more, but mostly Ruby could expect to get five dollars per tooth. Because this is just an average. I highly doubt that the tooth fairy is going to leave four singles and a dime under everyone;s pillow. Or at least I wouldn’t do that if I were the tooth fairy. Seems like too much of a hassle.
So five dollars per tooth. Perfect. Settled. But there is another important question still to be answered. Does the firsttooth come with a bonus? There is something special about that first tooth that you lose, to be sure. It is a rite of passage, but is it rewarded in an extra way by that crazy tooth fairy? Some might argue that the first tooth ought to get a higher amount of money, simply because it came out first, but that doesn’t seem fair to the other teeth. But then, after some more research, we discovered that the tooth fairy often will leave a special present in addition to the money in the case of the first tooth lost.
All prepared with advance knowledge of what we might expect come morning, Ruby decided to throw another kink into the works. She wanted to save the tooth. Not all of them, but she wanted to put her first lost tooth into her baby book. Hmmmmm. Well, there was only one thing to do. Ruby wrote a note to the tooth fairy, asking her to return the tooth if possible, and made a little pouch on the note out of paper for the tooth to go in. The plan was, the tooth fairy would see the note, leave the present, and the return the tooth, just this once, for use in future gruesome scrapbooking. And that was how I came to find Ruby’s tooth under mypillow in the morning.
You see, the tooth fairy did as requested and dropped off a pair of earrings as well as the predicted five dollars, and then, needing to leave the tooth somewhere, left it in a very tooth fairy-ish place: under a pillow. My pillow. I’m not the one in charge of the scrapbooks around here, so I don’t know why it ended up under my specific pillow, but Ruby was very excited to learn that her tooth was still in the house, although the note had disappeared. And Ruby’s present came in a super cool box with the tooth fairy’s initials on it, which probably took that poor fairy a lot of work to make. But it was worth it. We had a huge success, everyone was happy, Ruby got to show everyone at school her new earrings and her new mouth, and now we are ready for the next one to come out. We can’t wait.
