My youngest of three is 8 and losing quite a few baby (milk) teeth lately. I understand that the "Tooth Fairy" idea is alive and well in Switzerland as "la petite souris" or "zahnfee."

Having performed my tooth fairy duty just last night, while I was putting the lost tooth in its special container in my jewelry drawer I realized that after three kids, I have a rather large collection of shed teeth.

My question is this - what do parents eventually do with all those teeth? While saving them seems unnecessary, I don't know if I can bring myself to toss them as I will admit to occasionally being prone to over-sentimentality. Should I give them back to the kid someday? That seems creepy. And yet I believe it would be even more creepy to be cleaning out your parents' house someday after they passed only to find your own ancient baby teeth.

Too bad they can't be recycled!

Put them in a glass of Coca Cola.
Over the next few days they will dissolve.
Then explain the importance of brushing teeth and drinking less sugary drinks.

EDIT:
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tooth.asp

My children each had a little " Mr Men" tin that they kept their wee teeth in. As far as I know, they still have those tins stored away somewhere.
I also recall my father having all his teeth removed when I was about seven. He brought one huge one home from the dentist so that we could all see the roots on it. I added that tooth to my childhood "treasures" for a few years.

At least in the German speaking part of Switzerland, there were no tooth fairies when I was a kid, which was a long, long time ago. Tooth fairies, just like Santa Claus, Peter Pan, Haloween, etc., got imported from the USA through comics, movies, TV series etc..

However, many areas in southern Italy and in Turkey have tooth-fairy-like legends, and that not only since the advent of films, TV etc.. Although Greece lies exactly between said two countries, I never heard anything like that there.

Mr. Breakfast, did you?

i'm a bit of a savage but i keep all the teeth because i'm fixing on making a necklace with them one day, really. but following uth advice, may do the coca cola thing once to prove a point!

My father (who was a dentist) put one tooth in a some sort of hot metal mixture so I could put it on my key chain. I still have it.

It looks something like this it's just my own tooth.

really like the necklace!

Coke idea is super, will make a note of that one for future reference!

Now I am curious. Anyone got any knowledge on when/how the toothfairy myth came about? That fairy left me a penny for each tooth that I put under my pillow.

My.. here the going price is circa 2 to 5 SFr.

She's called "la petite souris" in French (lil mouse)

hahaha, myson used to beg me to pull out any loose tooth because he wanted the cash! god, what'll happen when he finds out you can sell your organs !!!

on the serious side, we'd give him whatever pocket change we had, and it'd end up being a very motivating math lesson...

Ours go deep in the rubbish bin - can't have little people finding them the day AFTER the toothfairy visited....

I can't see the point in keeping them. What are they going to do with all those teeth? The necklace idea is a bit creepy to me.

We had a teacher in junior school who had a daughter going through dentistry training and he asked us if he could have our milk teeth when they fell out to give them to his daughter.

I have no idea what she did with them (we were only 8 or 9 at the time) but perhaps you can call the local school of dentistry (or whatever you have in your neck of the woods in Texas) and see if they can use them.

While also perhaps a bit on the "creepy" side, another thing to do with them is to save them up until you have grandchildren and then use them to make home-made rattles, made of their parents' baby teeth.


On a less creepy note, this article on Dental Stem Cells seems interesting:

You could donate them to this project...

Not that we are aware of....

Seems you are owed some back-pay, Nil.

For many years, I had noticed that most patients who had grown up in Southern Italy including Sicily (although one should never call a Sicilian Italian...) wanted to keep extracted teeth, permanent ones, mind you, or maybe not so permanent in those cases.

I started asking them for the reason and heard things like, when you throw an extracted tooth over your right (?) shoulder onto the roof, a fairy will come, pick it up and eventually bring you a new tooth. Those people seemed to be dead serious about it, irrespective of their age.

I have far fewer Turkish patients than Italians, but in the course of several decades, I noticed that some of them wanted to keep their teethies too. After the fifth case or so, I asked the guy for the reason. He told me exactly the same story, but felt sort of embarrassed; he said, "Please don't make fun of me. I know it's silly but that's the way we were brought up."

__________________

"Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered a pair of socks meant to be worn with sandals from 2,000 years ago. Scholars say it’s evidence of the first German tourist." — Conan O'Brien