Hey there 🙂
I made a rookie mistake today: I tried to do something out of my ordinary routine.
I booked lunch with a friend.
(Lunch! I know!! A conversation with another adult – while eating – in the middle of the day without children. I was giddy with the prospect!)
This did not go unnoticed by the rule-keeper of the Mumiverse.
It so happened that Eldest’s maxillary right lateral incisor (tooth between front and canine) decided to come loose, and I walked away towards home with a cuddly reward request ringing in my ears – that might have to be presented tomorrow morning – but the tooth was still (literally) hanging in there by the time I saw Eldest off at school, so I’m crossing my fingers for more time…
This brought me to the realisation that I haven’t written an instalment of my “Tooth Fairy Tales” in quite a while, so I will blog you up to date with our expanding menagerie of colourful critters…which has grown to encompass humanoids recently, as you may have guessed from the post title 😉
[The preceding two chapters are here and here]
Santa
It does seem like Eldest’s teeth have a fondness for trying to cover his collars in blood just as I am desperate to manoeuvre the kids towards the front door of a school morning! Again, it was a race against time to get this tooth out and us all in the car (thankfully it was a Thursday and Hubby was working from home) on the 30th of November last year.
Although I am usually the squeamish one, Hubby really doesn’t like watching the gory twiddlings involved in a tooth howking session, so I drew the short straw because my mothering instinct trumps pretty much anything.
Damn you, nature! *shakes fist*
According to my gruesome pictures (which I took on Hubby’s phone, ha!!) the critical stage happened between 8.21am and 8.35am. We then had a free (bottom left) incisor! Yaaay!

(I made sure to indicate to Eldest how proud I was of him for being so time conscious)
I was busy that day, I can’t remember what I was doing (probably researching a suitable pattern?), but I didn’t get to sit and start making Lucy Ravenscar’s Chubby Santa until almost half past six that evening…then got waylaid considerably by the boys’ bedtime shenanigans; hanging laundry above the landing; realising I would need to swap yarns because it was too thin for the hook I was using (and I probably didn’t have enough of it anyway)…the usual fluff n nonsense!

I had crocheted Santa’s hat by 1.03am on the Friday; added a face, hair, beard and bobble by 2.27am; given him eyes and started his outfit by 3.07am and had finished him and parcelled up £1 in silver coins by 4.18am.

I was a mite tired when Eldest came in two hours later to tell me all about it, and to inform me it was now December and the real Santa would be visiting soon…
…But it was a happy gap-toothed seven-year-old who posed for some pics in our chaotic living room that morning before school 😉

Baby
All was then quiet on the tooth front (or the front eight teeth?) until March, when on the 7th Eldest complained about his 6th wobbler.
I casually (!) asked him what he was hoping for from the fairy this time, and he said: “a baby”. A little worried (!!) I asked him whether he meant a proper one, a toy one, or a baby animal…? He clarified that he meant a toy, but in the shape of a human baby. Phew… 😉
Cue me racking my brains for any patterns I had seen that looked easy!
I discovered Happy Berry’s YouTube pattern after dinner, and began watching it. I realised pretty quickly that I would only have time to make the hat or the nappy from Part 2 before bed. I made the nappy that night and the hat the next, and then was working on the baby on the 9th when Eldest actually lost the tooth!

It was clear to me (around 11pm) that there was no way I was going to be able to finish all the sewing etc of the baby for the next day (as I was exhausted from another crazy kid-filled week) so I was then confronted with a dilemma: how to explain to Eldest that the Toothfairy needed more time, without him being really disappointed?!

I plumped for writing a note. In my fatigued state, I decided it would be a good idea to do this in mirror writing, because even if I used my left hand it would probably look like I had written the note. So I sat at a ridiculous time of night and figured out how to write backwards with my left hand, realising too late that the notepaper I was using had an identifiable wee drawing on it. I cut that off and just put a weirdly shaped bit of paper in with the hat and nappy.
I am not that good at this planning stuff…
There was a good deal of discussion between our boys about what the items were when Eldest unwrapped the nappy and hat the next morning. (I had fun showing them that if you put the nappy upside down and then the hat behind it, it looked like a tortoise).

They did come up with the correct descriptions for my handiwork in the end though, and there was excitement at bedtime again with the prospect of maybe catching a Toothfairy lugging some sort of baby-like creation into Eldest’s room!
I had a thicker yarn for the baby’s skin tone (a Red Heart skein, but I bought it about a decade ago, so I can’t recall the name!) and thought that doubling up on the DK yarns I had used for the hat and nappy would make them big enough. This unfortunately wasn’t quite the case in reality, however, and I had to squash the baby’s head a little to make the hat stay on.
Sigh.
Why haven’t I bought thicker yarn in Eldest’s favourite colour yet?!
I finally finished the baby in the early hours of Mothers’ Day. Luckily it was another hit, and this time I was rewarded with lovely hand-drawn cards as well as being taken out for a family lunch – so it was all worth it 😉

Mike
I was determined not to sit up to all hours making this one, so I was doing my happy dance when Eldest asked for “a little bear” in exchange for his 7th incisor! I knew that there was a free Lucy Ravenscar pattern that would be perfect, so I made it the same night, wrapped it up in toilet roll and hid it in a cupboard. It took me less than two hours!
I can’t quite remember when this occurred, but it must have been near the end of June, in the midst of making a teacher gift and other things (see here). By our West Cork holiday in the second week of July, the tooth was still in place and I was briefing Eldest on the fact that even if it departed his mouth on holiday, our Toothfairy would probably wait until we were home to pop the requested bear under his pillow.
Although he had given her lots of notice, I reasoned, it had to be difficult to fly all that way with a bear in tow…and she wouldn’t want to send it via her friends in case it got lost (of course).
I needn’t have worried: the tooth didn’t fall out until the evening of the 20th of July, nigh on a month after I had catered for it.

I luxuriated in my relaxed evening, and was thrilled when Eldest got up, cuddled his little red bear and decided to call him Mike after the character in Monsters Inc.

And that’s you all up to date on our Toothfairy shenanigans!!
Except…look what the school sent home with Eldest this afternoon:

Sleep is overrated anyway.
*reaches for the orange DK yarn again*
😛
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