The Tooth Fairy Cometh

Having spent the past year teaching kindergarten Sunday school, I've grown to understand what's said about girls maturing faster than boys.
In addition to being smarter, better behaved and just more mature all-around, they also lose their baby teeth long before the boys do. There were a lot of girls wanting their two front teef for Christmas.
Until yesterday, none of the boys in the class had lost any teeth, as far as I knew. And the vanguard of the tooth-losing festival among his male peers turned out to be my 6-year-old son, Curt.
With all the hype leading up to the loss, thanks to seeing all his female peers losing teeth, the wife and I thought our human pogo stick of a kid would inform us at the first sign of minimal tooth wiggle. His granny had even given him a special pillow with a pouch for the tooth-for-money program.
However, Curt managed to keep it a secret until Sunday, when he informed us that not only was a bottom front tooth loose, it was darned near out of his mouth. We figured it would be a day or two at best before it fell out.
Yesterday morning, the tooth still seemed too entrenched in meat for extraction by force. During breakfast, Curt got a timeout for smacking his brother. And during that timeout, he fervently went to work on the tooth, yanking it with 3 minutes of his 6-minute timeout to go.
Household jubilation ensued. Leave it to this boy, who can be difficult sometimes, to give new meaning to the term "pulling teeth."
Timeout was over, whether I liked it or not. His brother, Luke, 4, did not like the celebration one little bit and got his pout on. I offered to use pliers to pull out one of his teeth, but he declined.
Last night, the boys went to bed with unusual ease, thanks to a notification that the Tooth Fairy would not cometh with boys still awake.
When I was a boy, I got a quarter per tooth. Adjusting for inflation, that would be like $10,000 these days, but we decided $1 would be fair enough. The $1-for-tooth exchange program went smoothly, and the human pogo stick proudly paraded his buck around the house this morning, much to his brother's chagrin.
Considering how many young kids are so into those goofy shoes with wheels on them, video games, DVDs and other modern-society trappings, it's nice to see a simple thing such as a tooth falling out generate so much excitement.