the shoe fairy

Sometimes I really do think I am on the verge of completely losing my mind. Perhaps it's just sleep deprivation. Last night I was woken first by my daughter Emily standing over me exclaiming "MOM!" and  I struggled up from sleep saying "WHAT?" and Em said "I LOST MY TOOTH!"  At moments like this it is critical to somehow find a way to stay rational, or become rational when you are still more than half asleep and your heart is pounding, so that you respond in an appropriate mommy-ish manner. So instead of batting her away and mumbling something like oh my god, you almost gave me a heart attack, please go back to bed and leave me alone, I managed to sit up, take some deep breaths and say oh honey, that's great, where IS your tooth? and stumble off into the darkness with her to stow said tooth away safely for the tooth fairy, and dab up the blood that is still oozing from her little mouth, and stagger back to bed again. I even managed to think clearly enough to convince her to wrap up the tooth and leave it upstairs with me, rather than let her take it back down to stuff into her tooth pillow that she keeps for these occasions. I eventually coaxed myself back to sleep, only to be woken by the telephone ringing around 4am, oh dear god, you know that's not a good thing. As I leap up and stumble off through the dark house in search of a phone, in the midst of my second heart attack of the night, my only conscious thought is oh my god, either someone just died or it's one of those dreadful wrong number long distance phone calls from India that we get periodically and I am going to have to spend 20 minutes trying to explain to someone that the person they are looking for really doesn't live in my house, so they don't call back again the next night. Anyway, I find a phone, say "HELLO???" and hold my breath. It's my father in law OH SHIT, who's dead, who is it??? and after he asks to speak to Mike I ask WHAT'S UP as casually as I can and he replies that they have a work emergency at a building he needs to ask about, and I am already starting to shut down again as I hand the phone over.
Anyway. Somehow I manage to get some more sleep, and wake up in time to realize that my husband is already up and gone, it's time to get the kids moving, it's Valentine's Day, AND I still have to remember a certain tooth fairy task. I head downstairs and remember, oh my god, did I put a Valentine in each of the kid's Valentine bags that my daughter Kate had cleverly thought to make, hoping to ensure some kind of loot for them on Valentine's morning?? My god, I did. I had gone to bed and then suddenly recalled those bags sitting by the fireplace (I guess we hang Xmas stockings by the fireplace, so Kate must have figured it was a safe bet to put her V Day bags near it too) and I had gone downstairs in the dark and cut out 3 pink hearts and written them each a message and stuffed it in their bags with...what? "Wagonwheels??" "We got Wagonwheels for Valentine's Day??" came the puzzled comments from the living room. Okay, give me a break, it was late, I was tired, and it was the only form of chocolate I could find at that hour.
So the girls mentioned that Em had lost her tooth, and I said, oh yeah, I completely forgot, why don't you run upstairs and get it from my room and put it away safe for the tooth fairy to find tonight? And off she went, and moments later she returned shrieking that her tooth was already gone and there was money in the little wad of toilet paper instead. She didn't even seem to notice that the tooth fairy had left an odd assortment of spare change rather than the usual tidy one dollar coin. :)
Feeling pretty with it we got through the rest of the morning routine fairly unscathed, and then it all fell apart. Em couldn't find one of her shoes. This is a many times a day event in our house - nobody but me ever puts their shoes away when they take them off, which would just be messy except that every time someone comes into the house our dog gets all excited and grabs the nearest shoe and runs off with it...So I lost my temper, yelled at the dog who of course had no idea what he'd done, yelled at my messy house, yelled at the girls to just get in the car, yelled at my husband for not putting the car seats back properly yesterday after he hauled a bunch of empties to the bottle depot, yelled at the god damn shoe fairy for taking a shoe as well as a tooth and sent Em off to school in her rain boots. At least they matched.
On a side note, after I got home, took some more deep breaths, had some coffee, I discovered the missing shoe stuffed half under the corner of the fridge, and in an attempt to redeem myself as a good mother I drove the pair of shoes to the school and deposited them in Emily's cubby outside her classroom. And people wonder what I do with my time....