Now without extra teeth.

Here he is - the boy who lost his first tooth at age 7.

(he's punching the air, which seems to be his new favorite photo pose)

And he was not going to pull that sucker out, no sir. He didn't want to wiggle it in the slightest. Instead, he waited until the permanent tooth he had growing behind it pushed that little baby tooth right on out. Literally. I saw the tooth barely in his mouth on Sunday, and we bribed him with lunch at a restaurant if only he would let me pull that tooth. So I reached in there and gave it a gentle tug upwards. And it just lifted right out. I do not think it was even still attached to anything.

And you can finally see it in this blurry close-up - [mental note: learn how to use camera correctly] the shark-like tooth that was growing behind the baby teeth. It's still got another tooth in it's way, so it cannot move up, front and center, until that tooth is gone too.

(notice daughter's perfectly perfect teeth (the dentist told her so!) in the background)

At this rate, he'll have all of the baby teeth out by the time he's 16 or so.

Oh, and the tooth fairy did visit him. We convinced him he should put the tooth in a ziploc bag so it wouldn't get lost underneath his pillow. We were thinking it would be easier for the tooth fairy to grab if it was in a bigger container of some sort. But the tooth fairy cursed a mean streak when she went in for the child's tooth late that night, and instead of a nice quiet retrieval, she was met with a noisy plastic bag. A bag which caused the child to toss and turn and mumble things in his sleep. And the tooth fairy was madly trying to come up with excuses for her presence if the child indeed woke up. Thankfully, he didn't awaken. Yet the tooth fairy feels that we should come up with a better tooth container so as to avoid the problem in the future. I'm wondering if it would be a major faux pas if the child put the tooth in a box, say, on the bookshelf. Or maybe just outside his bedroom door. I need to check into that...

My son awoke on Monday morning to see that the tooth fairy had turned his tooth (ziploc bag and all) into a dollar bill. When I suggested that maybe, just maybe, she traded his tooth for a dollar, or maybe even bought it off of him for a buck, he scoffed. "The tooth fairy," he explained to me, "is magical and she magically turned my tooth (ziploc bag and all) into a dollar." Then he nodded his head as if to say, yep, that's the only explanation possible.