Goodbye teeth...a tooth-throwing tradition

A while back I wrote about what we do when kids lose their teeth. Rather than a visit from the tooth fairy, we have a ceremony. Ericka lost 2 teeth from her lower jaw, so she decided to throw them under water at the lake at Camp Sparta. This was probably the most "official" ceremony we have had.

Getting ready to say goodbye to the teeth...

Proof that they were Ericka's and from the lower jaw

There goes tooth #1...

Followed by tooth #2

You can see how everyone is watching to see the teeth disappear into the depths below. So dramatic!! 

Give the poor tooth fairy a break!

It seems like I've been reading a lot of posts about the "Tooth Fairy" lately. I guess a lot of my friends have kids at that age, and the question has been raised, "what is the going rate for a tooth?" Well, the "Tooth Fairy" doesn't visit us out here on the road. We just move around too much and the poor fairy would go broke trying to pay market value for 13 children, all of whom are of "tooth-shedding" age. Not to mention that some lose teeth in their host homes, while I personally pull others. The fairy just can't handle the pressure of keeping up with that.

The question that has not been raised is, "what do you do with all the lost teeth?" Now I know there are some that may put them in a special box, or maybe in a scrapbook, but the thought of saving and keeping up with 13 kids' teeth is just plain gross (to put it bluntly), and I can just imagine little teeth falling out of the kids' suitcases in random places if they kept them.

Now I can't take credit for this brilliant idea. Our kids from India taught us about this tradition of what to do with lost teeth during our first year on the road, and I think the idea has spread to several other countries by now! It is an outdoor ceremony of sorts, and the key is to gather everyone around and make a big deal about it. If the tooth was lost from the upper jaw, then the "tooth loser" throws the tooth up on something (a stranger's roof, a tree, or in our case a church...). If the tooth was from the bottom jaw, then it's thrown under something. It's fun, it's quick, it's easy and it saves the child from having to face the traumatic question of "what do I do with all these nasty teeth?" when they go off to college. After all, we do call them "lost" teeth!

While we use this as an alternative to the "Tooth Fairy," I'm sure all of you could figure out a way to incorporate it with the fairy if you wanted! So anyways, if you should someday find yourself on a roof and you find a little tooth, you'll know either the Children of the World choir was there, or this great idea caught on!!