"I didn't know if he was dying or not, so I hopped on Google..."

I am explaining to Mom the minor crisis we had with our cat, Mozno, who is about seven months old now.

Mozno had been biting like crazy for days, and we assumed it was his patiently doled-out punishment to us for abandoning him for two weeks. Every website patiently reminded us that kittens bit, but I think I understood the difference between play-fighting and deliberate attempts to suck the souls from his caretakers. "Biter, no biting!" we would yell, quoting our little niece and the life lessons she learned from Dora the Explorer's friend, Swiper. But nothing helped.

Recently, I was reading on the couch and Mozno pounced ferociously. The more I tried to push him away, the more he attacked, angry and desperate, like his life counted on his teeth being dug into my hands. "What do you want from me?!" I cried.

Suddenly, I was a flash of blood on my hands--and it wasn't mine. I gasped and grabbed the cat hard, trying to still him so I could see where it was coming from. There was a tiny spot of red on his paw's white fur. "Mike!"

Then, there it was, an obvious spot in our navy couch. A cat tooth. Not just any cat tooth, but his front fang with a tiny bit of blood at its root. I held Mozno sternly and opened his mouth the way I'd seen my dad do to Oliver a hundred times to give him pills. There was a gaping hole where the tooth had been.

Did we call the vet? No. Did we observe the cat for any signs of pain? Not really. I flew to my laptop and Googled: "Do kittens lose teeth?" I had my answer in seconds. Yes, kittens lose teeth just like human babies; they are just rarely ever seen.

I breathed a sigh of relief, but was breathless soon enough as I continued reading on websites about people who had been "lucky enough" to find their kitten's tooth when it fell out and had--wait for it--scrapbooked it immediately. Some saved them in special shadow boxes. Comment after comment was cat owners praising each other for their luck in finding their kitten's tooth to save. I closed the search window. I felt dirty.

So, for the past week or so, we have been trading out the typical shoe strings for more industrial toys, like a waded up cardboard toilet paper roll for the cat. He chews and chews and chews himself into a blissful stupor.

The other day, I was headed out the door and grabbed our second set of keys from the hook by the door. Something caught my eye on the ledge above the hooks, and there was Mozno's tooth. Mike said he felt sort of weird throwing it away. Perhaps we'll scrapbook it...