The end to the troubled tooth and double the tooth fairy.

I mentioned in my previous post that Hudson was probably getting his tooth pulled. Indeed, that is what happened. Here is the background.

When Hudson was 18 months old we were having dinner at our neighbors house. Nothing strange happened, no collisions, I fed him dinner and there was nothing wrong in his mouth. When we got home as I was changing him into his pajamas I was shocked to notice that his front left tooth had a huge chip! To make a long story short, we had it capped which was a horrendous experience. They gave him (remember 18 months old) some liquid something to drink that was supposed to make him calm and sleepy. Instead it made him a screaming lunatic for 3 hours. The dentist words were, "he will make a really bad drunk." Nice. Anyway, they went ahead and strapped him down on the board thing (hands down my worst parenting experience ever) and capped the tooth. Ever since any little bonk to the mouth is really painful for that tooth. The dentist thought it would last hopefully until he was 3 or 4 and the fall out. Well, here we are at 6 and amazingly we still had the tooth. Until the night before first grade.

Camden and Hudson were out on the jumpy and had a collision that left Hudson with his tooth bleeding and hanging down half way. It was quite a look, and totally impacted his speech. Nice way to send your child off to first day for the first day of first grade.

You can sort of see how it is hanging down in this picture. Fortunately we got him into the dentist (I had to tutor, so daddy took him) that afternoon and he did get it pulled. Unfortunately the big tooth is not very far down so the roots were still there (and he is going to have a hole for awhile) and the extraction required 2 shots. He was amazing and didn't even cry, sweet boy.

The best part of the story though is how our family bounces between complete over-parenting/helicopter-ness and neglect. You see I went to bed and forgot to put $ under Hudson's pillow. Our rule (funny how these things evolve) is you get one gold dollar for a tooth, but if the tooth is pulled or falls out at school (both things that happened with Ainsley, that is how it happened) you get two. Andrew went to bed, and I was already asleep. Before falling asleep it occurs to him, being the awesome dad he is, that I didn't put any money under Hudson's pillow. So he gets up and finds my stash of gold dollars that I keep just for teeth and puts two under his pillow. He then gets up and goes to basketball before I am even awake. I wake up and as I'm walking in to get Hudson remember about the money so run back in and get two dollars and slip them under his pillow. I wake up Hudson and leave his room. I'm in the bathroom with Ainsley and Hudson comes running in saying, "I got four coins!!!" Ainsley starts flipping out, we have broken the rules! I say, "No he didn't, he is tricking you." But then he holds up his four dollars. I figure out what happened and start laughing saying, "the tooth fairy visited twice!" Ainsley thinks I should take the extra two away because this is of course not fair, I'm laughing at how we either forget to leave money, or both do it. But there is no way I'm taking money away from the kid who endured his first day of school with a nightmare tooth and then got it pulled and was so awesome about it. My kids know the truth about the tooth fairy. (have you ever read this story?) So now we have a new rule at our house, you get one dollar for the tooth, one more if it is pulled or lost at school, and an extra dollar for each shot that it takes to get the tooth out. By the time we are on Reagan who knows how many "rules" there will be in this family!

Here is our now tooth-less boy.