Dear Tooth Fairy

Dear Tooth Fairy,

It's me Anna. I lost another tooth. Well I didn't exactly lose it. I knocked it out. I was so upset. So before you come to my house please stop at the ice cream shop with the play area and please bring my tooth back to me. And money too. Thank you so so so so so so so much. Again thank you!!!!!!!

Anna

It was the third tooth that's gotten knocked out. Two others were knocked out last summer when she fell off the monkey bars. Today, she was at an indoor play area coming down a slide with another girl when she slammed her face into the other girl's head. Lots of blood. Cut, bruised, swollen upper gums. A swollen lip. One baby tooth gone. (Gone as in disappeared. We never found it. We think maybe she spit it into the wad of napkins I held up to her face, and we didn't realize it. Or maybe she swallowed it!)

Fortunately, another mom at the play area happened to be a pediatrician. She checked Anna out and thought everything was okay but suggested I call our pediatric dentist just to be sure.

I called Anna's dentist (a friend of mine), who said her gums will look bad for a couple of days but she'll be okay.

Knowing what a melodramatic kid Anna is, my dentist friend said, "So, how'd she handle it?"

I said, "Well, you know Anna."

"It was that bad, huh?" she said.

Yep.

But once we got home and Anna called her best friend and told her all about it, she was fine.

And she's expecting a nice sum from the tooth fairy, since this was, in Anna's words, a "traumatic loss."

Update: She got $2.00 from the Tooth Fairy. (She usually gets $1.00). She woke me up at 3:30 a.m. to tell me about it. She's so weird: she said she could "smell the cash" under her pillow, and that's what woke her up!