At long last Ben’s front tooth, which has been hanging from a thread for days now, unattached from the gum.

I’ve been watching that sucker for a week and was surprised every night that he still had it in. For someone who has trouble keeping his hands off of everything in sight, he surprised me with how much discipline he had to leave it alone.

When I got home from picking up Jack from school, the sitter had put the tooth in a napkin. Which I threw out before she had a chance to tell me it wasn’t trash. Instead of facing Ben’s reaction to the fact that I lost his tooth before the tooth fairy could pay him for it, I rolled up my sleeves and dug through the trash. It wasn’t that full, but it was full of the worst kinds of things – pistachio shells, rice (AKA teeth doppelgängers), mashed up fruits. When I got to the very bottom with no luck, I searched the floor. I had dropped it before it even made it into the trash!

One of the gifts Ben picked out for Hanukkah were a bunch of new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines.

So I let them help me hide the clues for Ben’s Tooth Fairy Scavenger Hunt…

Each envelope had a picture of the next TMNT figurine holding the next clue. Ben had to judge where they were based on the pictures (same as the ones you see above).

In the morning Jack was a super helper, leading Ben to the next clue when he wasn’t sure where to look.

Ben was his usual suspicious self, accusing both Adam and I of hiding the clues instead of the tooth fairy. He keeps talking about becoming a lawyer like his father. Perhaps with his propencity for argument and suspicion, he might have a future in law after all.  A first class litigator…