Sunday, April 23, 2006

Loveys

My daughter went 3 1/2 years before needing a lovey to sleep. Even through that object attachment phase around 13 months or so, she'd hug a little stuffed animal for a while (invariably one purchased by a certain friend who shares his birthday with her...who either has some baby/toddler whisperer capabilities or laces his gifts with the kiddy equivalent of catnip) but when she went to sleep, she wanted her space stuffed animal free.

In the past several weeks, she's taken to sleeping with a stuffed turtle puppet. Let me say, this is not a cute stuffed animal...it was probably purchased from the Museum of Science or one of those science-type stores they have in malls near you. For a while, Turtle was joined by Nemo, until she pulled all his stuffing out. Then she slept with Turtle and Nina (who is a little stuffed West Highland Terrier bearing resemblance to this formentioned friend's pet). Now she's settled with sleeping with Turtle and Winnie the Pooh dressed up as a dalmation (a Disney store release limited to the remake of 101 Dalmations) who has been a companion since my daughter was very small. See:
She's about 4 months old in this picture, a brand new Winnie seated next to her.

If you have kids or dogs, you can imagine what this stuffed animal looks like 3 years later having lived through learning to eat puree and then table food, getting stuffed into the bottom of diaper and travel bags, getting spit up on, going through the washing machine about a dozen times. Well, he looks pretty sad. Which is, I imagine, why my daughter is so attached.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When the author of this fine blog (Epiphany Alone) was small, she took to sleeping with Bert & Ernie from Sesame Street. Her father learned to mimic the voices. Talk about creating a monster. I had to always do the voices on demand. Of course, this was just a faze. Epiphany has not asked me to do the voices for a least two years...

Her Dad

Lady Epiphany said...

The problem is, my specialty has always been accents and dialects, not voices. The best voice I can come up with for an ugly turtle puppet sounds anemic and constipated.