You Know That's Daddy's Handwriting!

RATED PG-13


I just shattered my kids' belief in the Tooth Fairy.


To be quite fair, I'm sure they figured out where or who the stuff in your Christmas stockings and money for lost teeth really comes from some time ago!


Martha came in our bedroom after doing her Daily Burn and shower and told me Jeffrey and Sarah were already half-awake (half-asleep?) on the couch and Jeffrey who'd come down first told her when she saw the note Sarah had left for the Tooth Fairy after losing her upper left incisor ... today's title.


What can I say, my writing -- or in this case, my printing -- is pretty recognizable. And when the kids and I sat down to breakfast this morning and I got confronted with printing "Tooth Fairy" and winking in the space on the bottom right in that box bottom right, I admitted it. But they should not tell anybody! Oh, I'm sure some of their classmates know otherwise too, but why quibble? When Sarah and Jeffrey and others girls and boys become moms and dads, they'll deal with this too.


Another question I got from Sarah was an interesting one that I tried to answer. "What does 666 mean?" Well, besides it being the number after 665, many people believe it's the mark of the Beast, a sign that shows you belong to the Devil as opposed to belonging to God -- the context of Sarah asking the question was apparently a random number generator she was either told or learned that her teacher used. And we get to catch up with what our kids are doing in class (outside of what they tell us) next Tuesday at parent-teacher conferences for the second half of the year. One of the two times in the year that Martha comes with me to bring the kids to school in the morning, and I like it when she does! For there are moments the kids getting ready in the morning aren't so pleasant ...


Continuing yesterday from what would have been "Have You Seen Perry?", when I was with the kids at Minot Public Library I checked out William Caper's Platypus: A Century-long Mystery (ISBN 9781597167352) and learned a history of the platypus dating from its 1798 discovery by the governor of Australia -- a British colony at the time -- to the modern day. Of course the web-footed duck-billed egg-laying mammal EXISTED pre-1798, but it took a while to figure out it was a mammal.


A platypus is part of a special group of mammals called monotremes, and because they keep so much out of sight it's not known how many of them exist, and it's an educated guess how long they live. (21 years, maybe more.)


Ash Wednesday went especially well at church last night, and I got there just as our pastors were ready to impose the ashes. Jeffrey was asking me how long it would be before the cross


came off our foreheads, and I said the impression's known to remain for several days.


I could also say it never comes off because it's inside us. Forever.


David