The other day Hot Firefighter Husband walked into the kitchen with a sticky children’s medicine dispenser that he picked up from the Tyrant’s bedroom and said, “Sometimes I come home and I walk around the house and wonder what goes on around here while I’m gone.” 

I’m surprised it took him this long to make the observation. I often wonder what goes on around here when I’m here. Walking around the house is like playing an exuberant game of “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” 

Two spatulas, a whisk and a Littlest Pet Shop kitty are in a trash bag on the living room floor. A pair of training underpants has been sitting in the back porch sink for weeks. All the colored markers have been attached end to end to make a long sword-like implement. The remote control is in the bathroom. The couch has no cushions because the cushions have been made into an unsturdy fort which is being used as a bed for the Pterodactyl’s Blue Puppy. The colanders are all in the bathtub. The vacuum cleaner attachment is in the toy box. The toys from the toy box are under the couch. There’s a giant taxidermy fish on the deck. A bunch of screws are rolling around the counter.

And yesterday morning, my bathroom counter was covered in blood. 

Truthfully, the blood isn’t all that uncommon because the Diva has frequent nosebleeds. But this wasn’t her nose.

For weeks she’s been trying to lose her front tooth. It has been loose for quite a while, so I don’t blame her for being impatient, but I wish she could have left me out of this equation. Hot Firefighter Husband is much better at this stuff.

About 20 minutes after she went to bed, she sought me out and showed me a bloody paper towel. “Just pull it out, Mom,” she said.

I felt it and wiggled it and pulled at it to no avail. “It’s just not ready, honey,” I said. “Go to bed.”

She slunk off, and I knew that wasn’t the end of it. The Diva is strange this way. She finds Disney movies scary. She won’t learn to ride a bike because she’s afraid of getting hurt. One time when she stubbed her toe, I found her in the bathtub with a roll of toilet paper making a cast for her foot.

But if there’s a bodily situation that needs to be addressed, she’s on it. A scab? Pick it. A itch? Scratch till there are marks. A knot in her hair? Yank it out. And a loose tooth. Pull it.

Every 20 minutes that night, she came to me. By 11 p.m., I was pulling on the damn tooth with all of my might, thinking that if I made it hurt she would give up and go to bed. “Doesn’t it hurt?” I asked.

“No! Keep going!” she pleaded.

One last time, I found a dry spot on the paper towel, braced my palm against her forehead, and used my excellent biceps to pull. 

Out it came. I was as surprised as she was. 

The Diva’s eyes lit up, and she started giggling. Then she started gurgling because there was so much blood bubbling down from the hole in her gum. I rushed her to the bathroom sink and told her to spit. For the next few minutes, she spit, rinsed, blotted and iced her gum, smiling the whole time. “Oh my goodness!” she said at one point, when a good bloody stream of spit spewed forth. 

When the bleeding stopped, she cheerfully put the jagged tooth in her beloved tooth fairy box and trotted off to bed. I warned her that it was kind of late, and that the tooth fairy might have already passed this way for the night. She seemed fine with that.

But Tooth Fairy Mama felt as though that would not do, so I watched Oprah Winfrey’s show about hoarders while I waited for her to fall asleep. Apparently hoarding is now considered a mental illness, and it occurred to me to ask the Pteradactyl to stop hoarding all my kitchen utensils in plastic bags. 

The Tooth Fairy gave the Diva five dollars for her bloody tooth. I’m sure many of you consider that excessive, but this is not my fault. The problem is that the first time she lost a tooth, between her parents and her grandmother and her aunt, she received $25 from the Tooth Fairy. So in her eyes, the recession has already dealt her a significant blow. 

Anyway, the Tooth Fairy’s generosity was redeemed the next day when the Diva decided she wanted to take her brother and sister to the gas station -- which is among my children’s top ten favorite places -- in celebration of the tooth-pulling and buy them each two things worth one dollar apiece. I was impressed with her math. 

She wanted to buy for herself this new kind of candy that you spray in your mouth. I suppose it’s like a sugar shellacking that can coat your tongue and teeth and save you the trouble of actually chewing. I told her no. I have some standards. But I did let her get some horrible chewy sour things, one of which I later had to unstick from her shorts.

I realized then how the Tooth Fairy has become so entrenched in American capitalism that she rewarded her tooth-losing child with money that the child spent on candy that will expedite the losing of more teeth. It seems vaguely related to what Bernard Madoff did with his giant Ponzi schemes. 

This struck me as one more thing that just isn’t right, and it made me echo Husband’s hapless ruminating: What’s going on around here?