Bonegold from a Friend

After losing the second of her front teeth last week, my daughter made the usual pact with her fae friends, exchanging the tooth for geld. What I didn't expect was that a couple nights later she would ask, "Daddy, what happens if I leave money for the Tooth Fairy?"

She insisted on the experiment, and was excited to wake up this morning to find the money gone and a coded message left in its place. Luckily, she recognized that the message was in her Jum alphabet from Kabos.

A bit overwhelmed by all the little glyphs, she asked me to print out a copy of the alphabet and, similar to how we’ve been playing with codes, put each word on a separate card for easier decoding. As she plowed through letter after letter over lunch, she had me tell her about the Tooth Fairy again, and then read her the tale of the first skeletons.

By then she had cracked the code completely:

“ONLY KIND HEARTS RETURN GOLD GIVEN! SEEK SWEET ABOVE THE HEAT, DREAM OF MONSTERS WE’LL DEFEAT. I AWAIT YOU IN KABOS! YOUR FRIEND ARISTAMIA”

Thanks to the dozens of riddles sent by Grandma that she’s been solving this year, she worked through the rhyme pretty quickly and found a special cookie hidden in the cabinet over the oven. She had a couple nibbles of it in the car on the way to school, then asked me to save the rest for a treat later.

From the backseat she asked, ”What do you think Aristamia is going to do with the gold I gave back? I bet not many people do that.”

“I don’t think anybody does that,” I agreed.

“I think it’s going to be very special to her, and she’s going to keep it in the chest with all her teeth,” she said. “Bonegold.”

“Bonegold. Now you know how magical treasures are made,” I said.

”I do?”

”You do, because you just made one, by being so curious and kind, and by being a good friend to the Tooth Fairy.”

”Wow.”