August 9

You guys.

I was in the kitchen making breakfast this morning when Daisy ran in, shouting with excitement and panic, "CALEB LOST HIS TOOTH!"

1. She stole his thunder.

2. She was so excited for him.

3. It's about darn time.

4. Dear Jesus, thank you that I didn't have to pull that tooth out myself. Yuck.

So. Exactly one month after his seventh birthday, my boy finally lost his first tooth. The permanent tooth is already 1/4 of the way out, which is funny. That tooth has been ready to go for a long time, and its friend is getting ready to break free, too. I'm not surprised that he's so late to the tooth-losing game; after all, when he was a baby his first tooth arrived so late that I was worried he would be 32 and toothless. (I had lots of free time for worrying back when I only had one baby.) His teeth eventually came (two at once!) when he was ten and a half months old. 

And now they are falling out!

I was nervous about how Caleb would handle the loss of his first tooth. Obviously, he did great! (The one that fell out is on the left side of this picture, his right side. But you can see the edge of his new tooth already popping up, and you can see that its partner is standing at a jaunty angle, ready to jump out at any moment.)

It looks so tiny in his hand! He is definitely ready for bigger and better things teeth.

Sorry for the picture overload. Except that I'm totally not sorry at all, because this is a big deal. Look, even Batman on his shirt is pumped.

The kids know the truth about things like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, so Caleb didn't even need the Tooth Fairy explained to him. He knew. Still, we like to play, so Chris and I had a late-night, last-minute harried discussion about the going rate for teeth. One dollar? Five dollars, since it's the first tooth?  A quarter? With four kids, we need to be stingy! But then I realized that since we don't usually keep cash in the house, all we had was a twenty. I love my firstborn, but not twenty dollars worth. We were debating running to the ATM, then going to a store to break a twenty... 

Finally, Chris randomly found a dollar in our room. 

Problem solved.

Congratulations, Caleb!