The Tooth Fairy allowed the ChickieNob to keep the tooth she lost at the White House.  You know, because it’s special.  Normally the Tooth Fairy snatches those suckers up: if you want the cash, you need to relinquish the tooth.  But the Tooth Fairy understood that this one had sentimental value.

The ChickieNob has no clue what she is going to do with said tooth.  It is currently in my drawer.

I hope she doesn’t open the drawer and see the rest of her teeth.

[Fine; I’m the Tooth Fairy.  You got me to admit it.  Are you happy now?  Now that all the magic is sucked out of the universe?  I’m the Tooth Fairy.]

Image: Dave Haygarth via Flickr

I have no clue what to do with the teeth.  I don’t want to throw them out.  I also don’t want to keep a jar of human teeth.

I told her I would get her a small box to store the tooth.  Can you imagine that horror show when she’s older?  A friend is poking around her drawers and happens upon this cute box.  And she opens it up and finds BODY PARTS!!!  Because that’s all it is: a body part.  We wouldn’t think it’s okay to save our severed thumb in a box if we lost it, but I bet every single one of us either has one of our own or someone else’s tooth.

It makes me feel weak and woozy; similar to how I felt staring at the reliquaries in a Spanish cathedral.

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People seemed stunned every time the ChickieNob answered that the Tooth Fairy would bring her a dollar.  I thought that was on the low end, but people pulled me aside and said that it was very high.  We used to get a quarter, but I assumed the Tooth Fairy would adjust for inflation.  A dollar seemed like a good, solid amount.  Not too much — the average human child will only lose 20 teeth; meaning, the most we’re out is $40 with twins.  But not such a small amount that the child wonders why the Tooth Fairy expects them to lose four teeth just to have enough money to purchase a pack of gum.

Oh, and that’s the other thing that popped up in conversation: some people don’t give money at all.  They give toys.  Or candy.  Or special trips to favourite spots.  Is that common?  I mean, I could see doing that with the last tooth (wish I had kept better track so I would know how close we are to the final tooth), or the first tooth.  But… yeah… we’ve always gone with the dollar.

What did you get from the tooth fairy as a kid?  And if you have kids (especially those losing teeth), what are you doing now?

So, the kids went to cover the Kids’ State Dinner again at the White House on Friday.  (Click on that link to read their article!)  It’s obviously a mind-blowing, wonderful event that makes you want to go home and eat a salad.

And then there was this.

We were sitting in the press pen, waiting for the next interview when the ChickieNob looked at me and then took something out of her mouth.  “My tooth just fell out,” she said, grimacing so I could see the bloody space where the tooth once stood.

“Uh… urggggggg… uh,” I said, not knowing what to do with the human tooth that was now resting in the palm of my hand.  I mean, yeah, I know I grew her and everything, but when I signed up for parenthood, I did not realize that it would mean standing around, holding discarded body parts.

“Mr. Kass,” she said, pivoting to face Sam Kass, the White House chef who was passing by, “do you have time for some questions?”

Without missing a beat, she launched into her litany of questions while her brother worked the audio equipment.  And I stood there.  With a human tooth.

When they were finally done talking, I leaned forward and said, “Mr. Kass.  Um.  My daughter just lost her tooth.  Do you have… maybe a tissue… or something I could put it in.”

I wish I could have photographed his face as well as everyone else the ChickieNob told that day.  I’m sure it wasn’t the first tooth lost in the White House, but… I mean… bloody gums and a human tooth in my hand: probably not an everyday occurrence when the vast majority of the people working around you are over the age of ten.

Sam got her a napkin, and she asked if he wanted it back.  No, I don’t think Mr. Kass wants a bloody napkin back.  We put it in my purse and she said, “well, in that case, someone should make a museum of interesting things covered in blood.  This napkin could be a great exhibit.”

So my daughter can now say, before the age of ten, that she has zombie-walked through the Rose Garden and lost her tooth in the East Room.

Oh, and written two articles.

So this is it.

The 8th anniversary of the Roundup.

8 years, 403 posts, about 1600 posts highlighted.

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Yes, this is your weekly reminder to back up your blog, social media accounts, and email BUT, it is also an opportunity to point you towards a post that Keiko sent me.

It’s a checklist every blog owner should fill out and keep offline (yes, you need to make a paper copy) in order to have this information at your fingertips should the shit hit the fan with your site.

So an extra little task to throw into your weekly backup (because you are performing a weekly backup, right?)

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Sailor on the Rainpool Sea” (Blood Signs)
• “Crying Over Spilled (Breast) Milk” (The Long and Winding Road… to Parenthood)
• “So… How Did it Happen?” (Just Stop Trying and It Will Happen)
• “Visiting My Sister” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Go Quickly” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “When Your Rainbow Baby Dies” (Diana Wrote)
• “Where Are the Health Professionals?” (Stillbirth Matters)
• “Broken” (Stop, Drop, and Blog)
• “Right Where I Am” (Still Life with Circles)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing has a post about anniversaries on the infertility calendar, in this case, a good one.  One year earlier was the transfer date that yielded her current child.  I absolutely love this line: “Prior to this week, he used to marvel at baby girl’s completeness and muse, ‘A year ago, you didn’t exist.’  He can’t say that anymore.”  But what I really loved was the idea of setting aside Fertilization Day as a day for all future siblings to celebrate with the embryos that came from that batch.  It’s a unique holiday only singletons born from the same embryo batch could celebrate.  A tiny silver lining?

Life as I Know It has an encounter with a stranger that leaves her unsettled.  She writes, “But I knew there were little ears listening–ears that miss nothing, that internalize everything. How I responded was important. Yet again, I was woefully unprepared for dealing with this kind of situation.”  Despite feeling unprepared, she handled the man’s question beautifully.

Bee in the Bonnet has an emotional post about losing fictive kin, her mother’s best friend who was a second mother to her.  How the outside world can’t wrap their brain around relationships; that we constantly ask (and judge) how close two people are based on what we assume about relationships.  And in this post, it is quite clear that the labels we put on relationships such as mother, daughter, aunt, or friend do not convey the amount of love that exists between two people.

Lastly, It Is What It Is (or Is It?) has a post about a breakthrough that came in therapy, connecting all of her current and past behaviours to a single event: feeling trapped.  It’s a fascinating post about how the brain works; how our experiences inform our future actions.  And how we can rewire our brains to think differently once we know what informs our decisions today.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s the 8th anniversary of the Roundup.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 11th and July 18th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Until the brouhaha bubbled up to the surface, I wanted to read the new book by Marja Mills called The Mockingbird Next Door about living next to Harper Lee.  The journalist rented the house next door to Lee and formed a friendship with the author and her sister, Alice.  She claims that she had their blessing in writing the book.  Harper Lee says that she cut off the relationship once she realized Mills’s intentions; that she had moved next door specifically to write this book.

And now it comes down to a round of she said/she said.

Image: Jose Sa via Flickr

Either Lee encouraged the relationship and book, and then pulled back at some point, insisting she never agreed to an intimate biography (effectively wasting Mill’s time and money) or Mills wormed her way into Lee’s life for her own curiosity and gain and exploited a woman’s trust in order to write the book she wanted to write.  Either situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I was set to refrain from reading on that alone, not knowing the truth.

But the ChickieNob pointed out another reason not to read the book.  That no matter how curious we are, no matter how much we think the academic world could gain by having the author speak about her work, no matter how much we feel we’re owed something because we gave Lee’s book our attention and accolades, Lee should be afforded privacy.  She’s asked for it.  She clearly wants it.  To invade that is to disrespect her; a violation.

The best way you can show your love for the work and the person who wrote it is to follow her lead and do as she requests.  So I’m not going to read Mills’s book.  Even though I am so curious to hear what she has to say about her own work.

Are you going to read Mills’s book?  Would you read a biography where the subject is so clearly against having their story out there?  And in that way, how is it any different from reading someone’s diary without their permission?

The twins are in a computer programming club — think Girl Scouts but for engineering and coding — that I attend as well.  The ChickieNob was sharing a computer with a girl recently, and they were waiting for a dad to come by and help them with their wifi connection.  The girl tilted the top of her computer toward the ChickieNob and pointed at the stickers decorating her laptop.  “I’m really into Star Wars and Harry Potter,” she told her.

“I’m very into Harry Potter, and I used to be into Star Wars,” ChickieNob replied.  “The original three movies.”

The kids are entering into that age of passionate and rabid fandom.  I mean, yes, there have been things they’ve liked before this point — toys they were obsessed with or movies we watched ad nauseam.  But there is a difference now: they have entered that point where every single pore on their body is excreting their love for the objects of their affections.  Where it isn’t enough to just accept and enjoy what is offered by the film director or writer, but where they have stepped beyond into having their favourite things enter their self definition and they want to muse on it for hours like a crush, imagining well beyond what is on the page or screen.

They don’t just enjoy Harry Potter.  They talk about Harry Potter and his world as if they are classmates; family members.

I love it.

We’ve been talking about going to a Harry Potter conference once we finish the seventh book.  They like the idea of finding other people who equally like what they like.  They like talking about that point in the future; when they can go to a conference.  The anticipation is almost as enjoyable as reading the books.

We were driving this week, and I mentioned a family we met at a dinner party a few years ago.  Their kids didn’t know but the morning after the dinner party, they were surprising them and putting them on a plane to London to go to a Doctor Who conference.

“Would you like that?  If I just woke you up one morning and didn’t tell you where we were going until we got to the airport?”

“Are you going to do that?” ChickieNob questioned.

“Well… no.  I mean, I’m trying to figure out how you would feel about that.”

“Yes,” she told me.

“Yes… what?”

“Yes, please, take me to London to do more Harry Potter things.”

“But would you want to know ahead of time or would you want to be surprised?”

“I would want to be surprised or I would want to know.  Mostly, I just want to go do Harry Potter things,” she informed me.

I have a recurring dream where I show up at the airport for a trip and realize that I’ve forgotten my camera.  I’m filled with panic because my camera enhances my enjoyment of every trip and activity: I cannot imagine traveling (or doing anything) without a camera.  Granted, I always have two cameras on me at all times, but still, Josh knows about this recurring dream and how it speaks to my dislike of being surprised, even with nice things like trips abroad.  Part of the enjoyment of travel or a big event is the planning and imagining that takes place beforehand.  I like feeling prepared as I set out.  I wouldn’t enjoy a Harry Potter conference as much if I didn’t have weeks ahead of time to plan out what I wanted to do and re-read the books and re-watch the movies.  Even though sometimes it’s really hard to wait when you know that you’re going.

Where do you stand on the anticipation of travel?  Would you want to be surprised with a really good trip and not have to sit through a long wait, or would you feel as if you missed out on the chance to get excited about it ahead of time?