Whoever invented the tooth fairy idea ought to be punished

This is going to be an admission of bad parenting to my seven year old who has lost four teeth since last Sept. We are not, Really not, good at the tooth fairy thing. The first two teeth were normal. We got $2.50 in quarters under her pillow with no incident. (As a side note--how do you decide how much to give them? Do we have to account for inflation? I still think $2.50 was pretty steep, but Todd handled the first one, set a precedent, and now she has got some affluent teeth in my opinion.)

The next two, both of which have happened in the past four weeks, have been disasters. Emma lost the second of her two front teeth within a week of us getting home from the hospital with Cami. She put the tooth under her pillow on the 2nd day after losing it. We forgot to switch it out. She woke up devastated in the morning. We told her the tooth fairy must have been confused since she actually lost the tooth the day before but had forgotten to put it under the pillow the same day. (We thought, whew, we had a lame excuse to cover ourselves, but at least we had some logic to appease her.) 2nd night, we forget again. In the morning: a very distraught girl, again. We tell her to cut the tooth fairy some slack, maybe she's out of her routine. 3rd morning--we finally get it switched, thanks to Todd. It never even crossed my mind that night either.

So, we are quite contrite about messing up Emma's experience with the tooth fairy, when two weeks later she lost her fourth tooth, her 2nd front bottom tooth. I groaned to myself when the tooth came out, hoping we could manage to not botch this time up. Todd remembered that same night to get the 10 coins traded for that affluent tooth. The next morning, Emma woke up, came into our room and this time said, "What!!!??? Car wash tokens?? The tooth fairy left car wash tokens under my pillow?" Todd had bested me at remembering once again, but this time hadn't checked the coins well since 3 of 10 were wrong. Todd gave an answer that those could be used the next time we go to Peter Piper Pizza. She wasn't entirely appeased by that, but let it drop.

Personally, I think she may be harboring deep doubts in the ability of the tooth fairy. I can't blame her. All I can say is whoever came up with the idea had not just had a newborn that was waking them up and distracting them at night.