Milestone

Tonight Skipper lost her first tooth. It's been loose for so long that I was pretty sure she was never going to actually let go of it, but it's been holding on by a thread for days. She was, of course, pretty worried about losing it, and every morning for the last week I've said something like "I wonder if your tooth will fall out today!" and she's looked at me grimly and said something like "Oh, it won't fall out today." There's already a half-grown adult tooth behind it that got tired of waiting for Skipper to release the poor baby tooth. Tonight she bit into the remnants of the gingerbread house she made at school on Thursday, and her tooth socket started to bleed. She started wailing in terror, and I escorted her to the bathroom, cleaned the blood off her finger, and suggested that she pull the damn thing out. She was weeping and wild-eyed, and apparently undone enough by fright that she actually immediately did just that. Then she started worrying about the tooth fairy, and about how long it would take the tender spot to heal up. However, the pleasure of wearing her Christmas hat cheered her up, and she went to bed feeling optimistic.