Womze - Cross Cultural Parenting

“Look at my teeth mommy, they’re wiggling”, cried Darling Angel in excitement.

That was at the end of last year.  We were busy preparing to travel for Christmas and …well, we were just busy.  “Okay”, I responded while my mind was elsewhere.  So it wasn’t until after the new year that I paid any attention to the wiggling teeth.  The two bottom teeth in front were wiggling and right behind them were two permanent teeth.

A trip to a dentist was immediately scheduled.  We were overdue for a visit anyway and I have been planning to find a dentist (since we have moved twice in the past 18 months).  I wondered if the milk teeth needed to be extracted to give the permanent ones space to grow.  But my worries were calmed.  The dentist assured us that the two teeth would come loose on their own.  And the new misaligned teeth would eventually become aligned as the tongue naturally pushes them into their proper alignment.  If they had been upper teeth, we may have had to have an extraction because no tongue up there may equal permanent misalignment. 

Relieved, I could now focus my attention on what to do with the teeth when they do come loose…establish some traditions.  I had that at the back of my mind when I stumbled upon a book at the library, “Throw your tooth on the roof: Tooth traditions from around the world”, by Selby B. Beeler and G. Brian Karas.  I wasn’t looking for a book about tooth traditions but I was sure happy to find one.  It brought back memories of me throwing my tooth on the roof.  I recall my mom trying to remember the process and then instructing me on what to do.  We only did it on one ocassion.  On other ocassions, I put my tooth under my pillow hoping my parents (impersonating the tooth fairy) would replace the tooth with money.  They never did.

I flipped through the pages of the book with my daughter, marvelling at the differences and similarities between tooth traditions from various parts of the world.  Perhaps a study can be done (if one doesn’t exist already) on how the traditions dispersed through the world because the similarities are striking.  Based on this book, there are three common categories of tooth traditions:

1. Throw your tooth away in exchange for a new tooth.  In many cases, an animal (rat, sparrow, squirrel) is expected to eat the tooth and bring the owner a new tooth.  In most of the cases where an animal is expected to eat the tooth, it is thrown on the roof.  In parts of North Africa and the Middle East, the tooth is thrown towards the sun.  Some of the countries where teeth are thrown on roofs include Nigeria, Botswana, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Greece, Georgia, India, Indonesia and Korea.
2. Exchange your tooth for a gift.  The tooth is placed where someone/something replaces it with money or a gift.  The exchange agent could be the tooth fairy (North America, Denmark, New Zealand), a rat (El Salvador, South Africa, France).  In Mali, the tooth is thrown in a chicken coop in exchang for a big fat hen.
3. Make your tooth into an ornament - In Costa Rica and Chile, the tooth is set in silver or gold and made into an earring or necklace.
4. Hide your tooth.  In Malaysia the tooth is returned to the earth.  In Turkey, the tooth is buried where the owner hopes to go.  For example, it is buried in the garden of a hospital if the owner hopes to become a doctor.

“When your teeth come out, we’re going to throw them on the roof”, I announced to Darling Angel.  “But mommy?!”, she looked bewildered.  She didn’t think it was a good idea.  She was right.  There was a mountain of snow outside at the time and I didn’t feel up to traipsing in the snow trying to aim for the roof.

“We’ll put them under your pillow for the tooth fairy”, I conceded.

Now, all we had to do was wait for the teeth to come out.  And they did, while she was at school.  One came out, the other followed two days later.  Each one came home in a little ziplock bag.  Both times she handed me the bag in excitement.  Both times, she came demanding for her tooth to show daddy as soon as she heard his car pull into the garage.  Both times, she did not return the tooth to me.  Both times, she misplaced the tooth after showing it to daddy.

Now we have two lost teeth.  Perhaps sucked up by the vacuum cleaner, or hiding in a crevice somewhere to reappear in a few years.  Whereever they may be, we will have to wait for the next loose tooth to practice some tooth tradition.  Perhaps the next loose tooth would happen in summer and we would be happy to congregate outside to witness the tooth’s projectile on its journey to the roof.

I’m writing this post for Children’s Classics Carnival.

My daughter was 2.5 years old, and after several ups and downs with potty training I was at my wits end. I was impatient to be rid of diapers (or pull-ups as they are called) and my impatience may have led to an undesirable consequence - my daughter felt really terrible whenever she had an accident. I did celebrate successful potty visits but I may have pulled one too many long faces while mopping the floor from an accident that my daughter began to think she was better off in pull-ups. Splurging on pretty pants did not help as she pointed out the equally beautiful designs on her ‘big kid diaper’.

Pondering how to fix the situation, I took a trip to Barnes and Noble and browsed through the children’s books section, hoping to find a good potty book. And that’s how “A Potty for Me!: A Lift-the-flap Instruction Manual ” by Karen Katz came into our lives.

My daughter thorougly loved it and soon memorized the entire book. “Mommy, get my book”, she would call as she excitedly ran into the bathroom and plopped herself on the potty. I would turn the pages while she recited the words. However, whenever it got to the point where the character had an accident, my daughter would prompt me to read the part that goes “But mommy says that’s okay”. Hearing that seemed to give her comfort. I could tell that she identified with the characte and together, they learned that it was okay to have an accident. And as she learned that it was okay to have an accident, she had less of it. A lot less and at last, we got rid of the pull-ups.

Whatever mistakes I may have made while potty training, “A potty for me” remedied it and it got my daughter over that last hump to big kids pants. Other than that, the illustrations in the book were delightful and my daughter loved turning the flap. It’s hard cover and the inside pages were durable enough to withstand daily trips to the potty.

I couldn’t hold on to the book for long as it was too good to keep. I passed it on to a former colleague who was also trying to potty train her daughter, and I hope she found similar success with it.

I read a lot of books growing up and I don’t always remember the title of the book or the author.  When I read about 5 minutes for books children’s classics carnival, I immediately thought of writing about my favorite time travel book.  Except, I could not remember the title and I thought the author’s name may have been Engel, Ingall,  Engle.  Do I have a poor memory or is 20 years sufficient excuse for not remembering?  Thanks to google and the word tesseract, I was able to find the book.  It’s called a Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and it was my very first science fiction book.  While I remember being mesmerized by the story at the time I read it, I cannot recall the storyline and many other details.  But I’ve always remembered one little detail - tesseract.

Tesseract means travel in the fifth dimension, a type of time travel.  As I explained to anyone who cared to listen at the time, and for many years afterwards, a line is one dimension.  You square it to get a second dimension.  You square the second dimension to get a fourth.  The fourth dimension is the space we live in.  But if you squared that fourth dimension, you get a fifth.  Need more explanation?  Imagine taking a line from point A to B.  Then bend the line so that points A and B are in the same place, that’s the fifth dimension.  That’s tesseract!  And it absolutely made sense.  I found an excerpt of that section of the book here.  Note that use of the word tesseract in the real world is different.

As a kid, I was completed facsinated by time travel.  And when I read Madeleine Engle’s Wrinkle in time, I became absolutely convinced that time travel was easy…if only the physicists and engineers could let go of their rigid assumptions, they would figure it out.  If only I had the laboratory or the equipment to actually build a time travel device or to apply the formula to bend time and space, I could  take a trip back into history to verify the various assertions about the evolution man and how the dinosaur became extinct.  The possibilities were endless.

Today, I no longer believe in time travel and it’s such a shame.  The less clueless I became, the fewer possibilities existed and I sometimes  yearn for that time when anything was possible.

I found some reviews on Amazon and I was stunned to find that there was a lot of depth to the book which I had apparently missed.  I would love to read the book again and I have a perfect excuse to buy the book.  It’ll make a great gift for my daughter in a few years…or earlier.