Tragedy and Drama are Averted

This morning, Porter woke me up crying.

“The Tooth Fairy didn’t come last night!” he wailed.  “There was nothing under my pillow!”

Go ahead.  Say you don't believe in fairies.

Nuclear explosions have less force.  Porter has had his wail down since he was three months old.  He actually has an impressive and extremely emotive array of pouts, cries, screams and even one gnashing of teeth.

He hasn’t asked for sackcloth and ashes yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.

I’ll admit, I panicked.  In my semi-asleep, bleary-eyed, fuzzy-mind I knew I’d failed my child.  I’d failed to foster his belief in something magical and exciting that took much of the anxiety of losing a tooth and turned it into a positive experience of growing up.

And the tooth was lost.  It hadn’t just fallen out, as it had been threatening for the past two weeks.  It had leapt from his mouth with a hearty “GERONIMO!” parachuting into the deep undergrowth and disappearing like it was a native.

Tristan, who is almost always in Porter’s wake, came up behind and mimicked the same wail, though not with as much effect.

“Yeah, nuffing unda da pillow!” he informed me.

All of our children are reasonably empathetic, but sometimes, like when failure is staring you in the face with the collective angst of a 6 and 3 year old, it’s annoying.  That’s when inspiration struck.  My boys love to crawl into bed in the morning, so I ushered them up with some consolation.

“I’ll bet it was under the pillow,” I said, “but it slipped down.  I’ll go look.”

I have a great deal of credibility this week.  Porter went on his first field trip and insisted that he must wear a green shirt—his school colors.  We laid out the shirt on the end of his bed the night before to allay any fears of not finding the shirt again, but in the morning, he tragically informed me the shirt was gone and all he could find was a blue one.  I moved his blanket and there was the shirt.

What I call "Tuesday."

He couldn’t have been more impressed if I’d been Sherlock Holmes and found D.B. Cooper after five minutes of effort.

I dashed into the kitchen, grabbed a plastic Ziplock baggie, and then into the front room.  I fished through our collection of loose change, pushing aside pennies as quietly as possible to find any silver-colored coins.  I managed a quick handful, debated if I needed to actually go up the stairs (and possibly wake baby Xavi) and rejected it.  I’d been gone long enough, and the boys were giggling.

“Look what I found,” I told Porter.  I shook the baggie for effect.

Bam!  I was Indiana Jones and I’d just returned with Artemis ’ bow and quiver.

“Thanks dad!”

All in a morning’s bleary-eyed work.