Fairy faux pas

I am not a morning person. In the morning, if forced to get up at all, I prefer nothing more than silence, and a cup of coffee as big as my head.
I prefer, as a rule, not to be accosted at my bedside by an aggrieved 7-year-old, holding aloft a tiny pearl white speck in a baggie while babbling something about the tooth fairy?
The tooth fairy?
The tooth fairy!
Great. Just when I thought I had a lock on Mother of the Year, I have to go and forget to schedule “the tooth fairy.”
Forgetful fairy. Faced with the early morning evidence of a lingering lost tooth and no money in its place, a parent cannot tell his or her child that someone as great and mystical as the Tooth Fairy just “forgot.”
After all, the Tooth Fairy instinctively just knows where in the world a tooth waits for “her” visit.
She is further able to traverse her way into any home in the world a la Santa Claus and retrieve a tooth with no one the wiser.
Forgetting just doesn’t seem like something she would do.
It’s a pickle, all right.
Fortunately, if parenthood has taught me nothing, it has taught me to think on my feet – or flat on my back with my head half buried under a pillow – whatever the case may be.
Thus, at a moment’s notice, I was about to cast the mythical, magical tooth fairy in a part equivalent to that of an errant UPS guy.
Timing. “Oh that” I say, feigning a vast and thorough knowledge of Tooth Fairy habits, “that’s because you put it under your pillow too soon, silly”
“Too soon?” He asks.
He’s growing skeptical as he approaches 8 years old, but in his heart he wants to believe.
Besides, he had big plans for that dollar.
“Sure” I say, gathering steam, “remember, your tooth fell out at lunchtime, and you put it under your pillow in the middle of the day.”
I give this obvious faux pas the same gravity as my great-grandmother’s generation would have reserved for wearing white after Labor Day.
As if it is just one of those things that “Everyone Knows.”
“Therefore” I add, believing that if you throw in a few “therefores” and “furthermores” you can generally sound like you sort of, maybe, kind of know what you’re talking about.
I myself got through most of college that way.
“Clearly” (another impressive word if I do say so myself) “she didn’t have you on her route. She’ll swing by tomorrow