McMonk has stumbled upon a new source of revenue. She has always been envious of her sister's apparent ability to produce spending money (the trick, of course, is that Banana, after producing the money, decides not to spend any). The meager allowance she receives from her parents is greatly outstripped by the commercialistic monster inside her, fueled by the twenty second gotta-have-it breaks between her favorite TV shows. This has lead to her new past time - tooth self-extraction.

McMonk is fully aware who exactly the tooth fairy is. She steadfastly sticks to referring to them in the third person when talking to me or Jenn. She has been getting two dollars per tooth since the first one was lovingly stuck under her pillow. Late in the evening after the first post-Tooth-Fairy-Talk tooth loss, a very solemn, serious and long-faced McMonk came up to my bedroom after we had all gone to bed. With her angelic, big, brown, unblinking eyes on full power, she came close and said to me, "Dad, even though I know who the Tooth Fairy is, I still think it would be really, really nice if he came tonight." Then she came and hugged me and skittered off to bed. Being the soft-headedhearted dad that I am, I decided to go and give her two bucks for her tooth.

Well, a precedent had then been set.

That was at least a year ago. Now, back to the present day. For the past two weeks, we have had reports at the breakfast and dinner table as to which of her teeth is wriggly, along with wriggle-o-meter ratings. "See this one?" she asks, doing her best Elvis-like snarl, assisted by a pinky pulling back one corner of her mouth. "It's getting really loose. It should be out tonight." Then, sometime before bed, she skips upstairs from her room with tooth in hand to show us that there will be a payload under the pillow this evening.

Tonight is the second night in a row that there's been a tooth extraction. She seems to think this is a great (and sure) way to make money. I'm worried that as her supply of wriggly baby teeth starts to dwindle, I'm going to find her down in her bedroom with a figure skate and a rock, doing her imitation of Tom Hanks in Castaway.