***update at bottom!

So Filleigh Kay just lost her first tooth! It is pretty exciting times around here 😉

I have been debating on how to handle the whole Tooth Fairy deal. I do not want to ‘lie’ to her, we are super honest with one another, but I want her to experience the magic of the Tooth Fairy as well, I just do not want to set her up for disappointment when she learns it is not ‘real’. I feel like we work so hard (as adults) to create stories to pretend life is magic to kids that already know life is magic. And in our pretending we create a thing that we later have to say is not really magic at all, which then does make life seem not so magical, when the fact is, life IS magic. Every bit of it.

I mean the fact our heart cells beat in rhythm before we even have a brain, we breath in air that a tree breathes out and we can tell our hand to take the tooth out from under the pillow and replace it with some change … I mean that is pretty amazingly magical right? Why do we need to work so hard to fabricate a magical person then?

That said, I still want my daughter to experience the whole Tooth Fairy concept, and it does make the idea of your teeth falling out seem a bit more exciting.

So here is my story and I am sticking to it, because it is in fact, the truth.

The Tooth Fairy is a spirit, much like Santa Claus. Now some spirits have physical vessels (bodies) and some do not. The Tooth Fairy’s spirit does not have a physical vessel, so you cannot see her spirit with physical eyes, but she is still real. Because she does not have a physical body, her spirit gets help from other spirits that do have physical bodies (ie Momma and Daddy) … This is also how we explain Santa.

This Tooth Fairy spirit loves change and she loves to celebrate it. She loves how life is always evolving, growing, changing. She especially loves it when baby teeth fall out, because it signifies change. The changes of growing up. She loves to celebrate this change by … you guessed it … CHANGE … so in exchange for your tooth she leaves you some change, to celebrate the change!

Now the Tooth Fairy knows it is always more fun to celebrate together, so she gives her change in duplicates. There will be two piles of change, enough to buy a gift for yourself (the one that lost the tooth) and enough to buy a gift for a friend.

Now, I am not really telling you this to share our Tooth Fairy concept … more so I am telling you this to set you up for something Filleigh Kay said to me today that just blew me away…

She had just lost her tooth and was contemplating the Tooth Fairy and my description of her. She asked, ” So I cannot see the Tooth Fairy with my eyes right?”

I said, “Yes that is right, because she is a spirit.”

Filleigh Kay looked up at me with the most knowing little grin and said, “I know how you could see a spirit!”

“How?” I replied .. wondering what she might say…

She just grinned and pointed right to her SELF.

BOOM

She gets it. She so gets it. I have talked with her so much about how she is not her physical body, she is not her hand, she is not her face, she is not even her heart. She is herself a giant spirit…and her spirit has this awesome little body to live life in.

She did not stumble on her words. She did not ponder this deep thought. She just spouted it out. It made perfect sense. Yes we cannot see the Tooth Fairy because she is a spirit without a physical body, but we can see a spirit … because my daughter’s spirit has a body and we can see it with our human eyes. WOW

This child. How I love her spirit .. Now off I must go, as the Tooth Fairy’s spirit and my own swirl together as we guide my human hand to swap out the paper tooth under the pillow for some magical change. (Yes it’s a paper tooth, we had to draw a tooth because we accidentally swallowed the baby tooth with a bite of pbj sandwich, but that is another story)

*** update! We have the tooth!!! The good ole “horse poop in a clear bag to look for sand test” did the trick … but not horse poop this time … ummm , anyway …

Here is the TOOTH!!! (after it was washed with soap and hot water 😉 )

mmj