Another one bites the dust...

Here is Kate, at dinner.

(I didn't get a very good action shot, but she is flapping her arms in panic. Like a little injured bird. Also I love that in the mirror behind her, you can see Travis is calmly sipping his milk. This is pretty much how we all react when Kate starts to freak out.)

Why, you ask?

Well you remember last week she lost her first tooth. No big deal. Maybe that's because she was at school and I wasn't there, but I still believe the incident did not look like this.

Meantime, the remaining loose tooth wiggled into a kiddywampus position in the middle of all that open space, and then her gums closed up behind it, so pretty soon she couldn't straighten out that loose tooth even if she wanted to. It stood there kind of sideways making her look like a snaggle-toothed jack-o-lantern. Carved by a 4-year-old. Seriously, you couldn't take your eyes off of it whenever she talked to you.

And it MOVED when she breathed.

It definitely had to go. We were so sure it would be gone by this particular day that I was shocked to see her get off the school bus with that crazy little tooth still in place! By dinnertime, she was miserable. She was crying that she couldn't eat and every movement pushed that uncomfortable little tooth into a worse position and made it bleed. Travis leaned over with a napkin under the pretense of cleaning away some blood, and quickly whisked it right out of her mouth.

She wasn't mad at him. She was just so traumatized by the entire experience that she was instantly hysterical. She was shrieking and, as you can see, flapping her hands, and I was hiding my chuckling by - what else? - grabbing my camera and snapping pictures. Troy was upset by Kate's hysterics and began crying himself, and Brooklyn covered her ears with her hands and shouted, "All this crying hurts my ears!!!" It was awesome.

 

Kate didn't calm down very fast, either. Turns out she was less concerned about the physical yanking of the tooth from her mouth (she was glad to have it gone) and more concerned about her physical appearance. She complained that she didn't look like a princess, and I told her she looked just as beautiful without her teeth as she did with them (and secretly thought to myself that she looked much better without that scary little jack-o-lantern protrusion). And she wailed dramatically, "But I feel like a monster!" and burst into sobs. It was so sad, and also so funny. But can I blame her? How would I feel about my looks if suddenly I found myself with a bunch of teeth knocked out? Also she's at the younger end for losing teeth (she got them really early so I guess baby teeth have a fixed lifespan) and many of her friends still have a full set. She's not really the way-paving personality type in these kinds of things, you know?

Happily, she recovered and received another visit from the tooth fairy.

But this time she left a note.

(She wrote it in a hurry, so it got a bit mixed up, but she was trying to say, "I have heard of you but I don't know what you look like. What do you look like?" Read it bottom-to-top.)

Then at the bottom she wrote: "This is my last tooth."

HA. Take THAT, tooth fairy! Stop trying to come here at night and collect my teeth! You can take this one, but this is my last tooth. You won't be getting any more from me!

I guess it was too traumatizing to even consider going through that ever again.

[I can't wait until she has children!]

Good luck keeping the rest of those baby teeth safely in your mouth, sweet Kate!