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.

Everybody Hates Mime

I don’t consider myself an allergy person, but I feel like I’ve snorted about half a bottle of Drano, and I’m reasonably certain I haven’t done that in at least thirteen years.

I pulled into my driveway earlier this week and thought we were getting rain because that’s what it sounded like on the roof of the car. It turned out to be some type of fuzzy green seed. A LOT of some fuzzy green seed, hell bent on ruining my life for a few days.

It’s not conducive to thinking, this sitting around hoping to sneeze. It isn’t conducive to writing or cooking or cleaning or much of anything. At least nobody’s vomiting. Plus the kids are happy that I’m not feeling well enough to torment them. And that when I went out to buy tissues I also hit the half-price Easter candy.

In lieu of having any real content today, I’m going through my pictures. If you want to read something funny about the kids, go here. Or here. My dogs are sometimes funny too.

Here’s a picture of part of my console at work. It’s British.

Those two big rectangular buttons under plastic. They look pretty similar, no? The only real difference is that in the picture one is lit up and one isn’t. One of them, the one labeled PC 2, seamlessly switches to your backup computer if you have a problem. The other one, the one labeled CHECK, reverses all your mutes. Meaning, everything that is currently on, it turns off; everything that is currently off, it turns on.

It’s like the Opposite Button.

You really don’t want to hit this during a show. Even if you’re at the almost-very-end.

Which is why those helpful Brits made the CHECK button so different from every other button (except one). It’s why they put it under plastic (just like the other button). And put it far away from the other button (a whole two-and-a-half inches away so that you couldn’t possibly hit it by mistake if you got distracted by something, such as a patron trying to talk to you when you’re shutting down the computers while mixing the walkout music).

You’d never hit it on accident. Because that would make the band mics all turn off and the audience wouldn’t be able to hear the band and the band wouldn’t be able to hear each other and then the stage manager would be calling light cues off of silence, Keeping Calm and Carrying On by counting to eight in her head, over and over. Then it would be mime, and everybody hates mime. You’d never do that.

Not a second time, anyway. Especially not after you tape it up with a note like Kevin Bacon did in Apollo 13.

This is accidentalstepmom reminding you that it’s never too late to screw up in a brand new way. For more British ingenuity, set your alarm tonight for 4am EST- or better yet, stay up!