The Most Unreliable of All the Fairies

primary_teeth — You people are costing me a hundred bucks! Per kid!

To all of you parents out there who are leading your children to believe that the Tooth Fairy steals silently in the window at night while they dream, drips glitter in her wake and exchanges, via magic, five dollars for their precious, well-cared-for, and dramatically-parted-with teeth: STOP IT! What the hell is wrong with you? Do you know how many teeth children will lose before they have all their permanent teeth? Twenty. Twenty! There are multiple children in my house losing teeth at the same time, plus one in braces, and you people are trying to break me with your five dollars per tooth nonsense. Add it up.

The kids are constantly telling us how the Tooth Fairy left someone in their class five dollars, or seven dollars, or a Nintendo DS, or a pony. For five bucks, the Tooth Fairy better be sliding in some pre-orthodontia. Two bucks is the going rate in our house, unless the tooth has a cavity, in which case you get nada.

I am the world’s worst Tooth Fairy. That’s not entirely correct: CC and I together are the world’s worst Tooth Fairy.

The kids lose their teeth when we’re not around. I have never, not once, been present for the losing of a tooth when it wasn’t forcibly removed by the dentist. I don’t even know if they’re telling the truth about losing the teeth or not because I can’t keep the holes in their mouths straight and? The kids have this uncanny ability to actually lose the teeth that have come out of their mouths. When I was a kid I never had a tooth just up and go missing. It’s beyond my comprehension.

Believers don’t understand why they need to tell their parents they’ve lost a tooth because they think the Tooth Fairy has it all under control. Even when we do get notified, we forget, or else we don’t have any money on us because they already took it all.

Saturday #5 lost a tooth and didn’t tell us. I only found out about it when he woke up sad on Sunday morning. Luckily we have a whole backstory to cover the Tooth Fairy’s ass. Or throw her under the bus, depending on how you look at it.

#5: The Tooth Fairy didn’t come again.

CC: Son, the Tooth Fairy is the most unreliable of all the Fairies.

Me: Yes, she graduated at the bottom of her class in Fairy School.

CC: She totally would have flunked out if Santa didn’t help her cheat on the final.

Me: Because she never studied for her Fairy tests.

CC: She couldn’t; she was drunk.

Me: That may be why she didn’t come last night. She may have been too drunk.

CC: He. The Tooth Fairy is actually a man, did you know that?

Me: Yeah, he wears a cheap, ripped up tutu and you can see his leg hair through his tights because he doesn’t shave his legs.

CC: And his wand is bent.

#5: How do you know?

Me: Some nights he wanders in here when none of you guys have even lost a tooth, smelling like cheap whiskey and cigarettes and asks if I can break a twenty.

CC: Then he goes home to his tooth room and rolls around on top of his pile of teeth until he passes out. I’m sure that’s what happened.

Me: Why don’t you go put it back under your pillow and try again tonight?

#5 looked skeptical, but took his tooth in its little plastic bag and walked towards his room. Then he turned around.

#5: Do you think maybe the Tooth Fairy will leave three dollars for this tooth because it has blood on it?

Me: There’s blood on most teeth when they fall out. When I was a kid the Tooth Fairy left a quarter.

#5: Yeah, well I think money wasn’t worth very much back then.

I came to find out that in actuality, #1 pulled his tooth out for him. He told me this when the Tooth Fairy didn’t show up for the second night in a row. #5 is willing to place the blame anywhere else so as to exonerate the Tooth Fairy and preserve the money that he knows is coming to him, provided he can keep the Tooth Fairy sort of sober and not pissed off at him. It’s a valuable life skill and I am glad I can help him learn it at such young age.

#5: I bet that the Tooth Fairy has a calendar of when you’re supposed to lose the tooth, and because my sister pulled my tooth out, the Tooth Fairy didn’t know it was out yet. I bet that’s what happened.

Me: I bet you’re right. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened. This is all your sister’s fault, don’t you think?

#5: Probably.

Me: Right, it usually is. But I bet he comes tonight. There’s no way she could have pulled that tooth out of your head more than two days ahead of schedule.

#5: Right. It wouldn’t have come out, right?

Me: Right.

I’ve got to go out now and get change because it’s the third night, and even a drunk gets it right sometimes.

Lessons I Came To Late

One of the things I am most envious of regarding natural parents is that they have the chance to ramp up. Yes, the newborn thing is dumped on you all at once, which is remarkably unfair, as it is the most difficult stage of parenting. Until you get to the toddler stage. Until you get to the teenager stage. Anyway, my point is that natural parents get the chance to grow along with, and ahead of, their children.

And plan defense.

I read a decent step-parenting book on the plane on the way back from LA with the kids. But it left some stuff out, some lessons that it would have been helpful to know ahead of time. Here are a few:

1) Everything moves.

Unless I keep everything I may ever possibly need in my room and protect the entrance with an unbreakable curse, I will spend time looking for things. Every object that I need will be picked up by a child or teenager and moved to a different place. No reason necessary.

Here are some I never anticipated:

-Bracelets in the freezer.

-Car keys neatly put away in the back of the drawer with the DVD’s.

-Credit cards put away in board games.

-All of my socks in #4’s bed.

– My yoga pants wadded up in the sleeve of #5’s only suit (which doesn’t fit him anymore).

The rule also applies to their own stuff. My mantra some days is “I don’t know, it’s not my day to watch it,” which has helped teach a bit of self-responsibility. It has also led me to purchase several pairs of shoes because one or both of the pair I already bought have gone missing.

2) Clutter is a constant (k).

Hooke’s law of elasticity, which uses the k constant, basically states that strain is directly proportional to stress. Duh. No matter how much headway I make towards organization, the amount of clutter remains the same, although it may change forms and locations.

-If I make any progress on the paperwork pile, someone cleans out their backpack or their desk at school and brings an equal amount of paperwork home.

-If I manage to collect a couple bags of clothing and household donations, someone (ahem, #4) goes to a yard sale or, god forbid “trash pickin’ ” and returns with highly useful items such as broken ski poles, ceramic teddy bears decorated with plastic flowers, and pieces of MDF shelving (but never the entire shelving unit).

-If I get the common areas of the house neat, the overflow all ends up in my bedroom. The kids then see me as a hypocrite for telling them to clean their rooms when my own room is such a disaster.

-Kids clean their rooms by pushing everything under the bed or into the closet (actually, I should have remembered this one from the time I served as a child myself).

3) Kids lie.

When they’re still kind of little and cute, you mistakenly believe that they don’t know how to lie yet. When you catch them in a harmless fib, you blame one of their older siblings for teaching them how to do it. What you don’t realize is that the only circumstances in which they won’t lie is when it will make you feel better; they won’t lie about the dinner you cooked, the shirt you bought them, or whether your ass looks fat in these pants (not that you were talking to them in the first place, mister).

Other than when it comes time to spare your feelings, pretty much everything they say is an outright lie or else slanted towards getting what they want. Speaking of slants. . .

4) The cost of raising a child as reported in the New York Times is $222, 360.

This is bullshit.

The cost of raising a child from birth to age eighteen is: all of your money, plus 20%, plus whatever APR you were able to arrange for that 20%.

5) It can always get louder.

Now you know. If anyone has any other lessons you want to let me in on, I’m all ears.

Egg Hunt. Work it.

Yesterday the egg hunt was left to me. We gave up all pretense of the Easter Bunny doing it after that first year. So I locked the kids in the basement while I hid the eggs. I was given a walkie talkie with which to communicate, but it had neither a belt clip nor a fist mic and so I left it in the kitchen. I occasionally heard squawks coming out of it and I’m sure they wondered if I was ever going to let them out.

You must understand that they dyed thirty-three eggs.

This happened while CC and I were at work. Also, when I envision the kids covering the dining room table to protect it while doing an art project, I see cardboard. I see newspaper.

I never would have thought of wrapping paper. Ingenious. Wrapping paper that is eight dollars a roll plus shipping because I order it online a couple times a year in futile hope that there will always be wrapping paper for the nine billion birthdays we celebrate. The stuff that is stored right next to the plain brown, inexpensive craft paper. Neat.

In addition to thirty-three real eggs, I had twelve plastic ones, filled with various things. Forty-five eggs, that is, and I don’t even need #5 to help me with that.

I made it hard. We don’t really have a yard. We have a steeply raked (think: three stories high) and tiered mud and rock bank with 192,000 plantings put in by the crazy gardening woman who lived here before us.

I like how kids think parents won’t ever exert themselves. We exert ourselves constantly, what with the pretending to cook and running around and pretending to clean and buying things and also the working part. We parents are fully capable of exertion. A kid bases their concept of a parent not wanting to exert any effort because the kid comes to the parent at 9:30pm, on the parent’s only night off, when said parent is right in the middle of story time with a younger sibling and is tired from running around all day and in fact has already changed into comfy but cute yoga pants or maybe more correctly never got properly dressed that day and is thinking only of trying to get all these kids to bed to spend some quality time with the other parent if you know what I mean, and the kid says that they need posterboard for a very important project that is due tomorrow, so not only will the parent have to go out and buy the posterboard but the kid will need help with the project and also permission to stay up way past their bed time, and the parent swears, not exactly at them but definitely in front of them.

Children are incapable of understanding fine distinctions like this.

I exerted myself for the egg hunt. What better cause to spend effort on than your own personal amusement at the expense of your kids?

I pulled on my boots and hid those eggs on all three stories’ worth of that steeply raked mud and rock bank. I camouflaged them under the piles of leaves that I never raked up last fall, tucked them in among the crazy gardening lady’s 192,000 plantings, put them behind trees and inside separated bits of the retaining wall.

Of the plastic eggs, I issued this decree: One has a five dollar bill in it. One contains dog poop.

Oh, and we’ve had a lot of rain. And it was like eighty degrees yesterday.

There was an awful lot of complaining about how much work the egg hunt was.

The five-dollar bill one I hid in the recycling bin. #3 actually paused in front of the trash and recycling bins, looked back at me, and decided that it was too icky and I wouldn’t have wanted to touch that.

She forgets how many times I have cleaned up her vomit.

So everyone was pissed when #5, being fearless, dove headfirst into the recycling bin and retrieved a pink plastic egg that did, in fact, turn out to have a five dollar bill in it.

#2 was the one who found the very last plastic egg. They were all so convinced that I had spoken the truth regarding a dog poop egg that she opened it gingerly at arm’s length and the candy it contained exploded out all over the ground. Proving that despite all evidence to the contrary, they do still, at times, listen to me.

I win.