I had to confront one of these small fables this morning with the 5-y.o. -- she was determined to wear her red Uga the Bulldog dress to school because she wanted to tell everyone how excited she was about the upcoming holiday (celebrated exclusively within our household) of "Dawgs on the Jog", where in the week before the kickoff of CFB season Uga visits the house every night and hides red-and-black spirit gifts for the good little children to find in the morning. I hastily explained that Uga doesn't visit everyone, so her friends wouldn't understand.
She was insistent that perhaps she should tell them about it, and that maybe if she did that Uga would visit them, too. I began to understand how evangelical faiths gain adherents.
My wife eventually had to tell her that it was just Daddy being weird, but that she could keep pretending for the benefit of the 3-y.o.
We've got a collection of $2 bills, Sacagawea dollars, Euros, British Pounds, and other assorted foreign currency that we've been using. It's not like my kids are going to spend it anyway, this is purely just something to have in the piggy bank. This also mitigates the fact that all the kids in Kindergarten are comparing tooth payouts, and fostering some serious discontent -- one kid got a $20 for her first tooth! No way I'm matching that. This way, we don't have to match $5+ per tooth like some parents are doing.
As a final bonus, I have a 100 Trillion Dollar note from Zimbabwe that I bought on eBay that I'm just waiting to spring after the school year starts to create a bit of chaos in the first grade tooth market. My daughter won't know how to explain that its foreign currency, she'll just show her friends her 100 Trillion Dollar bill, who I sincerely hope tell all their parents that other kids are getting 100 Trillion Dollars (for real!).
I was the second child and got all the spoilers, so I wasn't sold on the tooth fairy to begin with. But my mom had no cash when I lost my first tooth, my mom had no cash and literally put a $5 check under my pillow. SIGNED BY HER!! Not even trying! It isn't like I was going to cash the check myself, she could have just signed "THE TOOTH FAIRY" and then shredded it.
In my house, my mother was the keeper of the childhood fantasy stuff. I learned when I got older that because of her lifelong struggle with mental illness, she was all the more determined to make sure I had wonderful fun memories of us together. And it worked - I had a really nice childhood with a lot of warmth and fun because of the work she put in to keep the magic stuff going. My parents and I reached a gradual understanding as I got older that none of it was real, but it doesn't have to be real to be valuable. I got a "Santa" present every year until I graduated from high school, even after my folks split up and my mother got really sick. I still have a couple of them despite my high-school diploma nearly being old enough to rent a car, and I treasure them. It was definitely worth it.
Incisors I think are 5 dollar teeth. Those are the money teeth and the gaps in the mouth everyone is going to see. Then maybe a sliding scale down from there: A bicuspid could catch you 3 dollars and then a dollar, dollar fifty per molar. Kids will surely readily understand and accept why they are getting less money for different types of teeth.
Canadians are fortunate in that we have $1 and $2 coins (loonies and twoonies) that look pretty sharp, nicer than a dusty old paper bill. Saves us a fortune.
I feel like we mostly managed to skate on the whole tooth fairy thing, but I'm also pretty sure we went with a Hot Wheels car on the few occasions we bowed to Tradition on this one. I kept a stash of Hot Wheels around for these sort of emergencies.
Scott / Georgia is a Verb - a link to this blog with a note referencing Dawgs on the Jog showed up in The Cipher, the Defector newsletter today. Newsletters colliding!
I have a 3.5 y/o and I am not looking forward to this dilemma. However, "Scaring children is so much cheaper than infusing their lives with comfort and whimsy" is my new motto. I'm now looking forward to "your teeth ran away to get the scary dog from across the street. it won't come over if you hide any others that fall out under your pillow so that they can't relay further messages"
The tooth goes in there and stays on the mantle in the living room "that way the tooth fairy won't accidentally wake you up. This system is tooth fairy approved."
2). Because his maternal grandparents did stockings from Santa, which always included a coin and an orange, Presidential Golden Dollars were already connected to gift giving. I went to a coin shop in Ann Arbor ostensibly to get myself some of the missing America the Beautiful quarters I needed and got $20 worth of Presidential Dollars and a tube to collect them. Very little fuss.
3). Some banks, for a small fee, will make books of singles. This would have the advantage of just being able to peel it off like a notepad as needed.
Here, for instance, is what I'm talking about from a small bank in Illinois:
we went $5 bill for first tooth, then two JFK half-dollars for each subsequent tooth. They understand it’s a dollar, but the novelty of two cartoonishly large coins keeps the greed in check. quietly whispering “do you want to end up like him?” also works.
We had a stash of Sacagawea dollars because those are easier to stash under pillows, and then we would offer the girls a dollar bill in exchange for the coin. One of my few useful parenting skills is that when I was tucking them into bed after they'd put the tooth under the pillow, I'd get the coin in right then without them noticing. Because they'd been told that the money would arrive overnight, they didn't check until they woke up... and I didn't have to try and crack open their creaky-ass doors at midnight.
First tooth is more money for sure, but the going rate here is $1. You can go to a bank and ask for brand-new super crisp $1 bills and stash them for the subsequent teeth. Even kids can tell the difference between a new bill fresh out of the wrapper, and that makes it special. Around the lunar new year a lot of people have the tradition to hand out "good luck money" in cards and the custom is to give out brand new bills, so the banks are usually well stocked around then if you want to be prepared.
We use a little tooth fairy pillow that my wife used when she was a kid. It has two small pockets, one for the tooth which we also put in a tiny ziploc bag and one for the money. We leave it on a dresser or bookcase right next to the bedroom door so we don't have to disturb a sleeping child to retrieve the tooth. I have a pile of $1 bills for this. All teeth are $1.
As for keeping the myth alive, one of my favorite depictions of the Tooth Fairy is in the Teen Titans Go! cartoon. They way that they depict him as this little weirdo collecting "smile bones" kills me. My kids love this version too, but the way that they talk about the Tooth Fairy IRL gives me the impression that either they "know" that he isn't the real Tooth Fairy or they are okay with him Ra-ta-ta-ta-tahing around or house while we sleep.
I had to confront one of these small fables this morning with the 5-y.o. -- she was determined to wear her red Uga the Bulldog dress to school because she wanted to tell everyone how excited she was about the upcoming holiday (celebrated exclusively within our household) of "Dawgs on the Jog", where in the week before the kickoff of CFB season Uga visits the house every night and hides red-and-black spirit gifts for the good little children to find in the morning. I hastily explained that Uga doesn't visit everyone, so her friends wouldn't understand.
She was insistent that perhaps she should tell them about it, and that maybe if she did that Uga would visit them, too. I began to understand how evangelical faiths gain adherents.
My wife eventually had to tell her that it was just Daddy being weird, but that she could keep pretending for the benefit of the 3-y.o.
We've got a collection of $2 bills, Sacagawea dollars, Euros, British Pounds, and other assorted foreign currency that we've been using. It's not like my kids are going to spend it anyway, this is purely just something to have in the piggy bank. This also mitigates the fact that all the kids in Kindergarten are comparing tooth payouts, and fostering some serious discontent -- one kid got a $20 for her first tooth! No way I'm matching that. This way, we don't have to match $5+ per tooth like some parents are doing.
As a final bonus, I have a 100 Trillion Dollar note from Zimbabwe that I bought on eBay that I'm just waiting to spring after the school year starts to create a bit of chaos in the first grade tooth market. My daughter won't know how to explain that its foreign currency, she'll just show her friends her 100 Trillion Dollar bill, who I sincerely hope tell all their parents that other kids are getting 100 Trillion Dollars (for real!).
I was the second child and got all the spoilers, so I wasn't sold on the tooth fairy to begin with. But my mom had no cash when I lost my first tooth, my mom had no cash and literally put a $5 check under my pillow. SIGNED BY HER!! Not even trying! It isn't like I was going to cash the check myself, she could have just signed "THE TOOTH FAIRY" and then shredded it.
In my house, my mother was the keeper of the childhood fantasy stuff. I learned when I got older that because of her lifelong struggle with mental illness, she was all the more determined to make sure I had wonderful fun memories of us together. And it worked - I had a really nice childhood with a lot of warmth and fun because of the work she put in to keep the magic stuff going. My parents and I reached a gradual understanding as I got older that none of it was real, but it doesn't have to be real to be valuable. I got a "Santa" present every year until I graduated from high school, even after my folks split up and my mother got really sick. I still have a couple of them despite my high-school diploma nearly being old enough to rent a car, and I treasure them. It was definitely worth it.
"where did you get this? This isn't even your tooth? Did you take this out of your brother's mouth?"
"PAY ME MY MONEY, TOOTH FAIRY"
Incisors I think are 5 dollar teeth. Those are the money teeth and the gaps in the mouth everyone is going to see. Then maybe a sliding scale down from there: A bicuspid could catch you 3 dollars and then a dollar, dollar fifty per molar. Kids will surely readily understand and accept why they are getting less money for different types of teeth.
Canadians are fortunate in that we have $1 and $2 coins (loonies and twoonies) that look pretty sharp, nicer than a dusty old paper bill. Saves us a fortune.
I feel like we mostly managed to skate on the whole tooth fairy thing, but I'm also pretty sure we went with a Hot Wheels car on the few occasions we bowed to Tradition on this one. I kept a stash of Hot Wheels around for these sort of emergencies.
Scott / Georgia is a Verb - a link to this blog with a note referencing Dawgs on the Jog showed up in The Cipher, the Defector newsletter today. Newsletters colliding!
I have a 3.5 y/o and I am not looking forward to this dilemma. However, "Scaring children is so much cheaper than infusing their lives with comfort and whimsy" is my new motto. I'm now looking forward to "your teeth ran away to get the scary dog from across the street. it won't come over if you hide any others that fall out under your pillow so that they can't relay further messages"
So a few things that have helped us:
1). We got this:
https://smile.amazon.com/Twinkle-Tooth-Shaped-Glowing-Pillow/dp/B079QNBHT5?sa-no-redirect=1
The tooth goes in there and stays on the mantle in the living room "that way the tooth fairy won't accidentally wake you up. This system is tooth fairy approved."
2). Because his maternal grandparents did stockings from Santa, which always included a coin and an orange, Presidential Golden Dollars were already connected to gift giving. I went to a coin shop in Ann Arbor ostensibly to get myself some of the missing America the Beautiful quarters I needed and got $20 worth of Presidential Dollars and a tube to collect them. Very little fuss.
3). Some banks, for a small fee, will make books of singles. This would have the advantage of just being able to peel it off like a notepad as needed.
Here, for instance, is what I'm talking about from a small bank in Illinois:
https://pnb-kewanee.com/services/pnb-dollars
we went $5 bill for first tooth, then two JFK half-dollars for each subsequent tooth. They understand it’s a dollar, but the novelty of two cartoonishly large coins keeps the greed in check. quietly whispering “do you want to end up like him?” also works.
We had a stash of Sacagawea dollars because those are easier to stash under pillows, and then we would offer the girls a dollar bill in exchange for the coin. One of my few useful parenting skills is that when I was tucking them into bed after they'd put the tooth under the pillow, I'd get the coin in right then without them noticing. Because they'd been told that the money would arrive overnight, they didn't check until they woke up... and I didn't have to try and crack open their creaky-ass doors at midnight.
First tooth is more money for sure, but the going rate here is $1. You can go to a bank and ask for brand-new super crisp $1 bills and stash them for the subsequent teeth. Even kids can tell the difference between a new bill fresh out of the wrapper, and that makes it special. Around the lunar new year a lot of people have the tradition to hand out "good luck money" in cards and the custom is to give out brand new bills, so the banks are usually well stocked around then if you want to be prepared.
I got $0.25 per tooth. Even as a small child, I knew this rate was bullshit.
We use a little tooth fairy pillow that my wife used when she was a kid. It has two small pockets, one for the tooth which we also put in a tiny ziploc bag and one for the money. We leave it on a dresser or bookcase right next to the bedroom door so we don't have to disturb a sleeping child to retrieve the tooth. I have a pile of $1 bills for this. All teeth are $1.
As for keeping the myth alive, one of my favorite depictions of the Tooth Fairy is in the Teen Titans Go! cartoon. They way that they depict him as this little weirdo collecting "smile bones" kills me. My kids love this version too, but the way that they talk about the Tooth Fairy IRL gives me the impression that either they "know" that he isn't the real Tooth Fairy or they are okay with him Ra-ta-ta-ta-tahing around or house while we sleep.