I’ve finally been able to play tooth fairy! It’s felt quite a long time coming, because BB, who’s nearly seven, appeared to be holding onto his milk teeth for dear life – until one popped out last week.

It started wobbling a while ago. Then BB was able to swing it precariously with his tongue. He was both alarmed by its looseness, and excited by my reaction. “BB’s got a wobbly tooth!” I told anyone in our household who’d listen. “That means the tooth fairy will visit – if you’re good!” [a Santa twist, but Christmas is coming!]

After several weeks of hanging by a hinge, and BB refusing to bite into anything in case there was blood and gore, the tooth finally fell out – at school.

When he got home, he happily told us what had happened.

“Mummy, LOOK! My tooth fell out in the cafeteria. I’ve put it in my lunchbox.”

We opened his lunchbox and took everything out carefully. We peered inside, then looked through the contents again. But, alas, no tooth.

“Are you sure BB? Maybe you swallowed it?”

“Someone must have stolen it,” he decided, rather forlornly. “Because they want the tooth fairy to come.”

That night, I suggested tentatively that we write a note to the tooth fairy to explain.

“Dear Tooth Fairy,” wrote BB, in his best left-handed scrawl [he tends to write backwards, but not this time]. “I lost my tooth. Please come anyway.”

The note was pinned on his bedroom door and BB drifted off to sleep safe in the knowledge that the tooth fairy wouldn’t give the money to whoever had stolen the tooth because the thief was sure to be a snorer who sleeps with his mouth open. The tooth fairy would see there wasn’t a gap – and anyway she just knows.

I slipped 10dhs under his pillow and crept away, knowing I probably wouldn’t see his reaction as it was my 5k race in the morning and I had to get up before sunrise.

But, my desire to actually see a tiny tooth nestled in tissue came true the next day, because – like buses – another rootless, pearly white dropped out that he managed not to lose. I have to admit I pored over it, turning it over like a precious stone and feeling quite emotional. It feels like yesterday, after all, that those teeth were just poking through, and now, here he is, getting all big and grown up on me.

So the tooth fairy has been twice, BB now loves to pull a gappy grin to show off the hole, and I’ve started a milk tooth collection in a silver keepsakes box.

The only upset person is BB’s little brother who now desperately wants to lose a tooth too. “When will my teeth wobble?” he’s been asking every night.

And, yes, I can’t help but wonder if the first tooth was in fact stolen – from under our noses, by LB.