Damn that tooth fairy

It’s been a week of comings and goings in the world of teeth – our eldest son Daniel lost his first baby tooth and baby Finn gained his first.
All week Daniel has been shaking his tooth and willing it to come out. Some of his mates in school are tooth loss veterans and know that loose teeth mean cash via the tooth fairy.
The going rate, according to one child, is £9. Another boy actually got a Nintendo DS from the tooth fairy. I told him that the tooth fairy I know only leaves coinage.
Daniel argued that the ‘Bottle fairy’, who we convinced him to donate his baby bottle to, actually left him a big, loud remote control car with a nice note of thanks. (The bottle fairy – sister of the dummy fairy and cousin of the tooth fairy – takes away bottles as donations to Santa’s baby reindeers and was the only way we got Daniel to give up his precious bottle of milk).
Now in my day the tooth fairy dealt in cold hard cash – 10p per tooth to be precise – and unless she’s now being sponsored by PC World I doubt she is dishing out computer games.
So I looked it up on the net, as I know the Tooth Fairy has gone all digital since my day. It seems the going rate is anything from £5 to £10 per tooth, but that some kids have reported getting up to £25. From my investigations the amount of money left per tooth seems to vary according to the level of income of the parents. This suggests that the tooth fairy either unfairly favours wealthy families, or she does not wish to encourage poverty stricken parents to use their children's teeth as an alternate, tax-free sources of income.
Daniel’s tooth came loose just before he was presented with a maths award at school. He walked up to the stage with a bloody mouth on him like a recently fed vampire and shook a bloodied hand with the principal, smiled a bloody toothless grin and ran back down to show all his mates the bloody gap in his teeth. A fiver was found under his pillow the next morning as was a letter explaining that as it was his first tooth he was at the top end of the earning scale but subsequent teeth would be far, far less valuable due to volatile markets.
Meanwhile the baby has been putting in his best efforts this week to push his first tooth through roaring red gums.
He wants to go down the traditional route to get his knashers – screaming through the night until morning, drooling everywhere, knawing everything in sight, being extremely grumpy. Quite frankly I’m going to go crazy with tiredness and may opt for the more conventional route – take him to the cosmetic dentist to have a set of Tom Cruise style dentures fitted to save my sanity.