I get out of the shower, put on my robe and head to the stairs to go wake my girl up this morning. There she sits at the top of them, all dressed and ready. I say “Good morning Sunshine” and she bursts into tears.

“I didn’t get any money!” she wails. Huh? Bad dream? Still sort of asleep?

Then it hits me. The tooth that had hung on forever was still sitting on her nightstand. The Tooth Fairy had forgotten it. Oh, what a horrible sinking feeling to know you’ve let your child down.

(image by Baddog_ via Creative Commons)

The leaving it on the nightstand was a new thing I was trying with this fourth tooth, and turned out to be both good and bad. Good that I now had an excuse.

“She must not have seen it there,” I could explain.

Bad because Mom had promised her there was no way it would be missed, and now the Tooth Fairy has to go back to digging around under the pillow to find it.

Tears dried eventually with reassurances that tonight we’d put it back in the traditional place and she’d find it, and we proceeded to breakfast. But, I still felt major guilt.

I tweeted, “Worst. Mom. Ever. The tooth fairy totally forgot to pick up a tooth last night. Girl crushed. Mom crushed.” And, was reassured to hear back that I was not the only one who’d had this happen. Several people presented good ideas for follow up, and I even shared one of them with her to show my girl that it wasn’t so uncommon.

So, we both found reassurance and absolution. And, tonight the tooth fairy delivered - including a little extra left to make up for the slight delay.

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I’ve always felt more comfortable expressing myself in writing than I have speaking, and it looks like my girl is going to be the same way.

This tendency was first noticed one weekend when we were having a bad day. I can’t remember exactly what we were arguing over. Probably something like me telling her she couldn’t go play with her friend because her room needed to be cleaned up first, or something similar. She had stormed off to sulk in her room, and as is my practice, I was ignoring such behavior and going about my day doing laundry.

After a while I could hear her slipping around the house, careful to avoid being seen. And little notes started popping up on table tops and taped to walls. The first ones were angry and mean. I continued to ignore and quit reading them until she asked me to look at one in particular. When I saw it said she was having “werd fillins,” my heart had a few weird feelings of its own. So, I asked her if she wanted to talk about how she was feeling and we had a great discussion about what had happened.

Well, over her Spring Break and while I was attending SXSW Interactive, she and her dad got to spend quite a lot of time together. Evidently one of those days he too laid down some law that she didn’t like because she left him a note that I couldn’t help but laugh at; and, when I shared it with some friends at SXSW the next day, they all agreed I should share it with you:

Now before anyone gets worried and starts recommending we all go for family counseling, take a look at the note she left him the next day:

I’m definitely going to hold on to these and look forwarding to seeing how her writing evolves. Something tells me she won’t share it as openly in a few years and most of her “werd fillins” will be locked away in a private diary, so I’ll enjoy it while I can.

Oh, out of the mouths of babes!

I take the kids to daycare every morning and then drive back home to work out of the house while the Daddy of the family leaves at the same time and drives into town to work. Maggie always asks, “Where is Daddy going?” and I always reply, “to work” and we talk about how everyone has a job to do (thanks to our beloved Frances book!) and that Daddy’s job is to go to work and Maggie’s job is to go to daycare. Today when I gave my usual reply, she said:

“Do girls work?”

Indeed.

I’ll spare you the analyzing I’ve been doing over the past hour, but they always serve up such zingers, don’t they? At the very least this proves that I should put on “real” clothes in the morning and brush my hair a little more…………

Kate Olson is a mother of 2 toddlers and lives in rural Wisconsin. She balances motherhood & working from home in a semi-functional fashion - you can read more about Kate on our contributors page. She blogs about education and lots of business/tech stuff at Kate Says . Want more? Read all of Kate’s posts!