“Hey, what’s he got against animals?”
My youngest daughter came darting into the kitchen and told her 12-year-old sister and one of their friends about her great idea of what to do.
“I know,” the seven-year-old said. “Let’s play that we’re animals.”
I interrupted and said, “That’d be a change.”
The older girls looked at me, narrowed their eyes, and said, “Ha, ha.”
“Mouse? Nah, I’ve not seen a mouse or a tooth.”
My children are growing up and losing teeth.
This is normal, of course, and so too the regular visits by the Tooth Fairy. The different thing in our family – American and English parents with three Argentine children living in Buenos Aires – is that another visitor also makes appearances: Ratón Pérez.
So who leaves the pesos?
My youngest, who has lost three front teeth, has figured this out – and how the Tooth Fairy and her Spanish equivalent coexist.
“I know,” the seven-year-old girl said. “Ratón Pérez comes, takes the tooth and leaves the money, of course, and then he cleans the tooth and gives it to the Tooth Fairy.”
It makes sense to me, even if the mouse seems to be doing all the work.
“Look, life is pretty good. Why do we have to muck it up with school?”
My eldest daughter is doing a preparatory course for a high school she really wants to get into.
She goes to the school every Saturday morning to study agronomy – the school’s specialty – along with literature, math, science and other subjects. She loves it, and she’s working hard to become one of the 60 entrants out of 250 aspirants.
I like taking her to the school. There’s a buzz about it, of kids like my 12-year-old daughter who really want to go to the school and make something of their education, make something of their lives.
The buzz is rubbing off on me.
I’ve started to run again and write more.
I thought, well, maybe my two other children should get a taste of the adrenaline, so I proposed taking them to fetch their sister. [continue reading…]