Tooth Fairy

My youngest son, N, has always been a bit of a skeptic.  If something doesn't seem logical or plausible, he's not likely to believe it without proof.  At a very early age, he decided that Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were all phony.  I remember he was particularly incredulous about the Easter Bunny.  Why, he asked, why would a rabbit hop about with a basket full of chicken eggs?  Was it even possible, he wondered, for a rabbit to hold a basket and hop at the same time?  He was not buying it.

With Santa, he saw a problem with logistics.  How does he get into the houses?  How can he cover so much ground in one night?  What about kids who don't celebrate Christmas?  If the elves are making the toys, why do they look like the same ones he saw at Target?  At age four or five, he let everyone know that he did not believe in old St. Nick.  Now, at age eight, I think he's learned that if someone wants to give him gifts and say they are from Santa, it's best to just play along.

The Tooth Fairy is probably the character he found the least preposterous.  Still, he had some issues.  He wondered why the teeth were taken.  After talking to his friends, he found a disparity in payments.  Again, there was the issue of how she was getting into the house undetected, although it seemed like a fairy would have an easier time than an overweight elf in a bright red suit.  Initially, he declared that she, too, did not exist.  He made this declaration long before he had any personal interaction with the Tooth Fairy.  He had not lost any teeth at the time and wouldn't for at least a couple of years.

I think, over time, a couple of things have happened.  First, much like he did with Santa, my son has reasoned that if there's an upside to pretending to believe, then why not play along.  Secondly, he's with a group of classmates who are all losing teeth, getting money and talking about the Tooth Fairy.  No one seems entirely certain as to her existence.  So many kids, so much uncertainty.  I think without definitive proof that she doesn't exist, he's willing, in this case, to leave open the slight possibility that she might.

Yesterday, he lost one of his front teeth.  He'd been wiggling it for a couple of days and finally got it free.  He placed the tooth in a Ziploc bag along with a digital camera and a note.  The note contained a brief greeting to the Tooth Fairy and a request that she take a picture of herself.  One of his friends had told him that she'd asked the Tooth Fairy to leave a picture and that the Tooth Fairy instead left a note explaining that there were no cameras where the Tooth Fairy came from.  Because of this, N left detailed instructions, both written and pictorial, explaining how to operate our camera.  The whole works went under his pillow.

This morning he was excited to see that the Tooth Fairy had visited him during the night.  The note and tooth were gone, replaced by money.  But he was more interested in what could be on the camera.  Would he finally have the proof he sought?  What he found was a single, very close-up and slightly out-of-focus picture of a nose.  We reasoned that the Tooth Fairy probably held the camera too close to her face - maybe her small size made it impossible for her to do anything else.  Anyway, it was still quite a prize.  N looked at each of us and then at the picture, satisfied that it was different enough.  Finally, he declared, "That is definitely a fairy nose!"

I suspect second grade recess will be very exciting today.