Ready

One evening last week, Noah commented at the dinner table that he had a wiggly tooth. "No way," I thought. He has to be mistaken. But upon further inspection, it was indeed a bit wiggly. The dinner conversation moved to the Tooth Fairy and what would happen when the tooth fell out, things we had never talked about before, because frankly, I thought we were at least a year away from him losing his first tooth. A few mornings later, at the breakfast table this time, that wiggly tooth was becoming a bother. I offered to pull it out for him and went to get a piece of cloth to grasp it with, but before I could  return he pulled it out, all on his own without a bit of fuss. 

As a planner and crafter, I was also unprepared. Had I seen this coming, I probably would have made a little tooth pillow. Instead, we found a special little seashell container to keep it safe and put under his pillow.

This milestone kind of blindsided me, and in many ways affected me more than his first day of school, or his fifth birthday. The loss of that first tooth is somehow a more concrete sign that he is really growing up, even more so than going to school, or his ever increasing height (how are those pants we got him a couple weeks already too short?!). In Waldorf education, the change of teeth is one sign that the first stages of body building are complete and the energy that was put into growing can now be directed at learning, and specifically, learning to read. This boy is ready. And I am getting there.