Stem Cell Savior!

            OK, So I don't even know where to start this post! As an adoptive Mommy it has always been a nagging fear that one of our children would need the type of rescue only genetic family, or stem cells can provide. Chances are we could NEVER provide any type of "match" for Tuck seeing as we're a totally different race. The girl's have one another, but no other family to help. We obviously adopted all of our children way after birth, so cord blood banking wasn't an option. I chalked this up to just another thing on a long list of stuff that we missed out on. Recently, I read somewhere that you can recover stem cells from a child's baby teeth. Yes, BABY TEETH! I was in utter shock, and incredibly intrigued. I honestly felt like we had been given a chance to go back in time & make it "right". So i did some research on the topic & found an amazing company at http://www.store-a-tooth.com/ , that offers this service. I called and spoke to a representative and asked what probably seemed like a million questions (he was very nice as I asked everything from how the quality of these cells are to how they are used). The long and short of it was like this, they use the "pulp" inside the tooth to harvest out stem cells. Though it doesn't provide as many cells as cord blood does, they offer a service to culture the cells, or basically multiply them in the lab. The younger the teeth the better, so baby teeth are perfect. There is no need to go have a perfectly good tooth yanked out, but when it gets pretty loose you should go to the dentist so they can help pull it out before the tooth & the tissue inside "die". Store-a-Tooth sends you a kit ahead of time, and it has everything you need to save the tooth & transport it to them. I got my kit ahead of time, that way when one of Tuck's teeth gets really loose I don't have to rush to get the kit. So, I took a bunch of photos of my kit!

So when my kit came, I opened the outside box & this white box was inside.

 Inside THAT box was this styrofoam box, to send everything back to them in, it is insulated to keep your tooth cold! Note, they will do up to 4 teeth at one time for the same price, so if your child is having extractions etc. keep that in mind.

 When I opened up the styrofoam container all the items below were inside, I'm going to give a little recap of what was inside, instructions, 2 ice packs to freeze ahead of time to pack in your cooler. It came with a little jar filled with solution to preserve the tooth & a bio hazard bag to put that in. It also came with a fed-ex label to return everything with. It even came with tape to close the return box with!

This is the little jar of preservation liquid, you drop your tooth in there to keep it from dying.

 It also included explicit instructions that are very detailed & easy to understand, all the way down to how to re-pack everything to send back.

 But, by FAR the coolest thing included was this awesome Tooth Fairy certificate. Since you will be "stealing" your child's tooth so you can mail it in, they won't be able to leave it under their pillow for the tooth fairy, so you give them this certificate to leave for her. Adorable right?

Overall I am very excited! As an adoptive parent we so often miss out on the things that other families take for granted! Being able to store our babies cord blood, or be a genetic link to help them at a later date is probably one of the biggest ones. I pray we NEVER need this kit, but it feels really nice that our son will have the same opportunities that other children who's parents stored their cord blood will have. Tuck has yet to lose a tooth, but I will let you guys all know when one is lose & how it goes when we send it in! For now I have my kit waiting to go!