In early April, just a few days before Easter Sunday, the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, made a reassuring declaration: The tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny were essential workers and would not be giving up their posts or working from home during the pandemic.
“You’ll be pleased to know that we consider both the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny to be essential workers,” Ardern, who is the mother of a little girl, stated at a news conference. “But as you can imagine, at this time, of course, they’re going to be potentially quite busy at home with their family as well and their own bunnies.”
This was surely a relief for the many children who have lost their baby teeth recently, as teeth wait for no pandemic, and as soon as those little things fall out, kids are eager to cash in by tucking them under their pillows at night.
So, with the work status of the tooth fairy firmly established, the next logical step was to make sure she’s outfitted with proper protective gear, and one 7-year-old girl in Michigan recently implored her mom to do just that.
According to a Facebook post that has since gone viral, when Kayla Westhouse’s daughter Evolette lost a tooth, the girl promptly asked her mother to craft a tiny face mask for the tooth fairy so the fairy could more safely do her job of retrieving teeth without risking her own fairy health.
Westhouse’s initial reaction was to explain that the tooth fairy didn’t need a mask because she couldn’t contract the coronavirus. But Evolette persisted in making her case, peppering her mother with questions about how she could be certain that the tooth fairy doesn’t need protective gear to complete her duties.
Her reasoning included arguments like, “She has to enter my 6ft bubble to get the tooth from under my pillow,” “[the] tooth has been in my mouth, where all the germs are” and “What if she comes to my house, and then goes to another kids house? Then that kid has MY germs too.”
Something tells us that Evolette might have a bright future in epidemiology ahead of her.
Evolette also wondered aloud if her mother had anything better to do that night besides fashioning a Band-Aid-sized face mask. Harsh, but fair!
Westhouse decided to honor her daughter’s wishes and she set about creating the tiny face mask. “I found myself last night at the sewing machine,” she wrote on Facebook. “Making my 178th mask. For a fairy. And now you can tell all the children that the tooth fairy is safe.”
Thank goodness! Now, how do we go about thanking the tooth fairy for her essential service? Can someone please bake a tiny pizza to send to her home?
This story originally appeared on Simplemost. Checkout Simplemost for additional stories.
