The next day was Field Day at Annalee's school, and I was volunteering. I was outside helping with the sidewalk chalk station when things got slow and I thought, "I'll go see what Annalee is up to." I went inside the gym and found my little girl in tears with blood all over her face. They had been riding around on little dollies that they could sit on or lay down on and then propel themselves across the gym. I immediately surmised that she must have crashed face-first into another kid. She saw the blood and thought it was coming from her nose--she often gets nose bleeds at night--but I knew it was from her tooth, and I was right. Her tooth was gone! Like, really gone. We couldn't find it! I looked all around the area where she was but couldn't see a little tooth. The other kids were still shooting across the room, sending the tooth to who-knows-where, I was sure. I crawled back and forth, back and forth across the very large gymnasium. A few teachers and parents asked what I was doing and I explained and they were like, "Oh, teeth are small. That's too bad." I was really annoyed. Couldn't they give me a hand? Maybe it was silly to them, but this was her FIRST tooth! Not only that, but she is our oldest child, so it was our whole family's first tooth, and we'd been awaiting it for weeks! With decreasing hope I roved the gym, looking at every speck of garbage on the floor. I said a prayer that I would find it and went to the opposite wall to see if it had been knocked under the folded-up bleachers. As I started crawling along the bleachers I saw, with horror, that the space under the bleachers was littered with popcorn. Grimly, I continued inching my way along, when I suddenly had the thought to look the other direction, back into the vast space of the gym. About 15 feet away was a tiny speck on the floor that looked too small to be a tooth, but I figured I'd better check it out anyway. It was her tooth! It sure looked a lot bigger in her mouth than it did out of it! It had one tiny point of root left on it, showing that it hadn't been quite ready to come out when Annalee hit her face on the floor. Yes, I found out later that she'd smashed her face on the floor, not into someone else. That's one way to get out a tooth!
She was very excited for the Tooth Fairy to come. She wanted to put it under her pillow, like she'd seen on tv, but I explained that when I was a kid my mom had put it on the windowsill and the Tooth Fairy still found it. (Brilliant, Mom!) She kept asking me how the Tooth Fairy could get inside our house and I asked her what she thought. She didn't know. "Well, how does Santa get in?" "Through the chimney!" (Duh.) "Yes, but not everyone has a chimney. How does he get in then?" We figured it had to be magic. "Oh, I know!" she said. "She goes POOF!" I bet she does. Annalee finally decided to put it on her dresser "so it will be easier for the Tooth Fairy to find it." The Tooth Fairy hadn't been to the bank in a while but she found a friend that had a cool coin and when Annalee woke up in the morning she had a gold dollar coin! She carried it with her everywhere until she lost it. I'm still hoping we'll find it in the van somewhere.
She had a tooth coming in right behind the loose one (not under it) which is called "shark tooth". Her adult tooth is happily moving forward now so she will have to lose a few more teeth before she gets to enjoy a hole in her smile.
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