The hard way to summon the Tooth Fairy

Pollyanna Laura fell out of a tree this afternoon.

We had gone up to our corrals to the potato/raspberry patch to do some weeding and get potatoes for supper, and the kids had gone into the woods to play "bear". All of a sudden there was yelling, a crash, and howling. The damage isn't as bad as I first thought, based (ahem) on all the blood. There's one lost tooth (it was loose anyway), a split lip, one neck scraped on the left side (she had scraped it on the other side just last weekend at baseball camp, and it was healing nicely), one dinged ear, and one shakey and upset little girl. The injuries wouldn't have been as bad if she had fallen out of a regular tree, you know, the kind growing on its own, surrounded by grass. But this pesky poplar is in the midst of a thicket, with fallen trees all around, too. When the branch gave way, I think she must have hit at least a few branches and a fallen log on the way down. Ouch.

To the boys' credit, they came running out to get me just as I went running in after hearing the commotion. I found her under a log, covered with blood from the neck up (as the mother of two boys, I've learned that any head wound bleeds a lot, and the amount of blood doesn't always correlate with the extent of the damage) and crying.

Besides the pain and all the blood, Laura was mostly concerned about losing the tooth and not having any proof for the tooth fairy, who was just here the night before last for a tooth lost the regular way (this latest extraction makes three in a row missing on top and three in a row missing on the bottom -- quite the gap). I nearly had to drag her into the truck because she insisted on searching the underbrush for the darn tooth. I told her that tooth fairies know when a tooth is lost as opposed to, well, "lost". Just in case Mom is wrong, she wrote out a note of explanation to go under the pillow; of course, if it's really good, I'll have to photocopy it and stick it in her binder (shameless home educating mother that I am).

I sure hope we have enough money around the house, because this is going to take some chunk of change after all she went through....