The tooth fairy visited our house.  If you are a kid and still stay up trying to catch her, please do not read beyond this point.  This is your official spoiler alert.

So, Isaac lost his 9th tooth yesterday.  He is 9 and thinks it is just amazing to average one tooth a year.  Anyhow, he was chomping a chocolate muffin when it just popped out.  The cool thing about it is that it is one of his back teeth so he doesn’t have the toothless look.  He’s starting to care about his appearance.  I thought I taught him better. Anyhow, he retrieved the tooth from a mouthful of spit and half chewed Otis Spunkmeyer chololate muffin.  We told him to rinse it off and put it in his tooth fairy pillow (that’s actually a pouch that he hangs on his door knob…we have a smart tooth fairy).  He got a goofy smirk on his face and said, “Dad, I know you put that money in there at night”.  My heart dropped.  I knew the time was coming.  In fact, it might have come a long time ago I suppose but it sort of crushed me a little to hear him admit that he knew I was the tooth fairy.

I still didn’t admit anything to him but I sort of feel obligated to tell him everything so that he doesn’t go to school and talk about Santa, the tooth fairy and other supernatural creatures only to get teased.  Still, it breaks my heart a little to see my son (who is going into the 4th grade) lose a little of the innocence of childhood.  Like I said, I htink he has known for awhile but to make it official is pretty tough for me.

A co-worker of mine says that his kids (who are much older) still receive visits from Santa, et al. as long as they play along.  I think we’ll arrange that deal so that Abigail will still have the magic and my illusion of innocence will be maintained.  At least he doesn’t care where babies come from yet…