First time in a while I have a good story to share, so here goes....
My oldest daughter is now five and old enough to lose her first tooth, which she had been in the process of losing for the last couple of weeks. Tuesday comes around and I get an excited call from my wife while at work that my daughter's tooth had fallen out at last. She wanted to go to some length to make it memorable for my daughter when the tooth fairy visited, so she asked me to go by the bank to get a dollar coin as the payment for the tooth. She also hunted around on the net Tuesday night for a "certificate" that the tooth fairy signed and left for my daughter congratulating her on the feat. So far, so good.
As I'm putting my daughter to bed, I'm laying light hints that the tooth should be placed in such a way that the tooth fairy will have a relatively easy time of retrieving it (implying that I'm not going to have to worry about trying to find a relatively small thing underneath her head without waking her). My wife comes in after I do and tells me that she's put the tooth in the sack of her tooth fairy doll (something my wife found at a sale recently and got since our daughter's tooth was falling out), which was hidden under one of her pillows. Again, so far, so good.
Our bedtime comes, so I grab the coin and the certificate and quietly creep into our daughter's room and feel around under her pillow for the doll and the attached bag with the tooth in it (hoping all the while I don't wake her since her face is resting on the edge of the pillow in question and trying to think of what to say or do if somehow the unthinkable happens). Fortunately, I'm able to find and fish out the tooth and replace it with the coin, which I try to check to make sure was in the doll's bag before leaving. I set the certificate on the nightstand beside her bed and leave. Still going good. Should be interesting to see how she reacts in the morning.
Morning comes and our daughter comes into our room and she's
deliriously unhappy with what she's found. She's in tears because she can't find her tooth. She also can't understand why the tooth fairy left her just a measly certificate. This is because the doll was positioned somewhat close to the edge of her bed and must have fallen out between her bed and the nightstand during the night, causing the coin to fall out, so she's completely unaware of the coin. I go and find the coin and show it to her, which starts to help her recover somewhat from what had happened.
I go back and inform my wife what's happened and we spend the next several minutes cracking up because our daughter's first encounter with the tooth fairy nearly left her convinced that the fairy was a con artist. "I can't find my tooth and all I got was this certificate!!"
