Being a kindergarten teacher, I have the opportunity to watch kids grow and change right before my eyes. By the end of the year some of them will have learned to tie their shoes, some will have grown 5 inches, some will lose their lisp, and many will lose their first tooth. All of this is very exciting for them and they're all very eager to reach each milestone, even the one that involves losing a part of their body followed by a stream of blood.

I have watched my students excitedly wiggle their first loose tooth in order to make it happen sooner. The "late bloomers" even wiggle unwilling teeth to reach this exciting milestone. By this time of year half our students' smiles are starting to look like creepy jack-o-lanterns. Yet, this does not stop them from flashing their new toothless smiles at you. They wear the holes in their smiles like badges of honor, telling their peers all the gory details of how they got it.

My stomach isn't as strong as it should be for someone in my profession because I find wiggly teeth and bloody gum holes rather disgusting. The worst is when they show me a tooth hanging on by a thread. Ew. I even had to pull one out with my bare hands once. Yet, as gross as it was there was something magical about it that made it all bearable.

It seems society has done a great job at easing the pain of this early childhood metamorphosis. This is due in part to the fact that this change is inevitable and marks the passage from early childhood to middle childhood. And for little kids becoming a big kid is the most important goal they have, no matter how bloody or ugly it is to get there. It also helps that they are still young enough to believe that a tooth-collecting fairy comes in their room at night and exchanges their bone fragments for dollar bills.

This tooth fairy thing got me thinking that grown ups need something magical to help us through our late life changes. A Wrinkle Fairy? Gray Hair Fairy? Hip Replacement Fairy? First Pair of Reading Glasses Fairy? At the very least it should be socially acceptable to run up to your peers and say "look, at my first gray hair! isn't it cool?"

Change is inevitable at every stage of life. Let's make like kindergartners and wear our ugly marks of age like badges of honor!