Up Hill Both Ways

I remember being soooo excited when the tooth fairy left me a quarter under my pillow back in the olden days. Man, I feel like a chump now!

Case in point #1: my daughter Aimee’s letter to the tooth fairy after she lost her first baby tooth on Wednesday. Hilariously funny in its honesty and directness, but also a little eyebrow-raising because of how she can so casually ask for $5 for a baby tooth.

It's kinda sad that the small things that used to thrill my friends and me to the point of hysteria when we were kids (“Oh my gosh! I found a quarter!” “Hey, we get to go to McDonald’s for dinner!!”) are now met with an eye roll by our own kids – “Is that all you got?”

A friend has a relative who gives her kids $75 for each lost tooth. That is not a typo. Seventy-five dollars. Holy carp. (Also not a typo.) Talk about setting unrealistic expectations! Another friend said her daughter got all bent out of shape because the tooth fairy only left her a dollar while her BFF got $5. OH, THE HUMANITY!

(Seriously, shouldn’t there be some sort of salary cap on tooth fairy visits? Who can I lobby about this?!)

Now, I should have no room to talk about this because (a) I was the youngest of three girls, so I was spoiled by default (...and by the fact that my parents were so exhausted by the time I came along that they had pretty much given up teaching anything but the most rudimentary of civilizing behaviors), and (b) I don’t practice what I preach with my own kids.

Case in point #2: my other daughter Katie’s 11th birthday. She’s getting a new cell phone and two tickets to “Wicked,” plus a pretty amazing birthday party with 18 of her nearest and dearest friends. And yet I’m worried that I’m not doing enough.

I think I had ONE birthday party when I was little; the rest were spent with family. My girls? They’ve had big birthday bashes since their first birthdays. The only exception was the year that Aimee got strep throat and we cancelled the party, but we still ended up at Chuck E. Cheese, which NEVER happened when I was a kid!!

It’s a competitive parenting jungle out there, y’all. You can talk all you want about teaching your kids the value of a dollar or not falling victim to rampant consumerism, but really – if you had the chance to throw your kids a total blowout for their birthdays, wouldn’t the kid in you jump at the chance to do it?

I will now go hang my head in shame!!