Bravery pays off!!

When your tooth can do this...
...and this,

and THIS...

It's time to pull it out. We were all in agreement that it needed to come out, we just couldn't agree on how. Braeden finally talked me into HIS way, which made me cringe!! Jason was no help at all since just the sight of a wiggly tooth makes him nauseous!! (the reason he's a doctor and not a dentist)

The whole time I was tying the string I kept asking him if he was sure he wanted to do this and he never once wavered or showed one bit of fear! He was literally begging me to let him do it. I finally gave in and we went out back to do it. I told him that if he was going to do it, he had to commit to do it and throw it hard... no sissy throws.

I had explained to him that it's very possible that we won't be able to find his tooth after it comes out. Neither one of us saw where it went, and since the baseball was on the complete opposite end of the yard after he threw it, his tooth could be anywhere!! After we looked for about 15-20 minutes, we decided to wait until the sun went down so it was easier to spot a tooth in the green grass. We looked for a while again, then looked again when Daddy came home... no luck. We had all but given up when Braeden had the idea to come in and look at the video we had taken (see bottom of the post) to see if we could see the tooth fly out. I took the video with my digital camera and it wasn't a very good one (at least for the detective work we were trying to do) ... there was no telling where the tooth went from the video, BUT... I did see that it looked like the string might have pulled the tooth towards me. So, we went out for one last shot to find it. As you can tell, it is NO SMALL TASK trying to find one lone tooth in St. Augustine grass!!

I happened to step on a particularly sharp piece of grass, and even though I knew it was just the grass, I bent down and pulled the grass to the side, and this is what I saw... Do you see it?

I couldn't believe my eyes! IT WAS HIS TOOTH!! Of course I screamed for Braeden to come over and when he realized I had found it, he tackled me onto the ground in a big hug! WAY WORTH THE EFFORT!!! If you go back and look at the first grass picture, that is what it looked like before I pulled the grass to the side. His tooth is actually in that picture, under the grass. It was no small miracle that I happened to part the grass right where his tooth was laying!

Braeden thinks the best part was that the tooth fairy gave him extra money for his bravery!