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Monday, July 25, 2011

The Thousand Names of Baby Bear

So a while back we lost Lily's stuffed animal, Baby Bear. We had lost her at a local mall previously, but quickly recovered, but this time it was more permanent. We were never sure if she fell off the roof of the car in the parking garage or if we actually made it all the way to the highway before she made her tumble. So we rushed an order on eBay for a replacement Baby Bear and Lily was none the wiser.

She was temporarily lost again at Great Nanny's house, and we ordered another replacement, but in a scene familiar to sci-fi fans, the original was unearthed when the clone was still running around. So we had two Baby Bears, and since Lily takes her everywhere, she occasionally gets left behind at school or at a sleepover, whereupon we break out the Baby Bear we keep in my dresser drawer.

Well, we had a moment where she saw both of them. The one was in a duffel bag from a sleepover and the other was out in the open. Lily poked in the duffel and saw the replacement. She looked at Jen and then asked in a hushed whisper, "Did you know that there were two Baby Bears?!"

So now she's making distinctions between the pair. She announced that one is Baby Bear and the other is Bear Baby ("Her nickname is Cubby, because a cub is a baby bear!") Sometimes when she's laying down to sleep, we'll hold hands and think of "silly stuff", though that's usually more a thing that Jen does with her. I was doing it the other night and I suggested that Baby Bear's mom was really Triplicate Girl, and there was a third Baby Bear out there. She sat up and her lip quivered and she said, "I bet she's all alone and really scared," and I had to reassure her that the third Baby Bear was the white one we gave away to another little kid for a birthday, and that she was happy and well loved.

We were in the cemetery a couple days after that, and we saw a cloud that looked like the number three. I asked Lily who would write in clouds like that and she answered, "Mother Earth?" and later on she said, "You have to listen to Mother Earth!" in that absolutely sincere way little kids have.

She's asking a lot more esoteric questions, like "Does space go on forever?" and "Does the earth ever get any bigger?", the last because she knows there are more people being born and she's worried we'll run out of space. I asked her what we would have to do if we did run out of space, and she said everyone would have to share a house with an old person, and got upset when I thought that was funny.

This Friday, Jen's car broke down on the way home from work. She's terrible about charging her cell phone, so we couldn't reach each other on that. So, I went to the garage where she was going to be towed, waited for 45 minutes, and then got a phone call from Jen on a borrowed phone that she was still waiting for the truck, so I went to pick her up. I got there just as the truck was leaving with her car. Convenient, right? Or it would be, if my car didn't choose that moment to break down as we were driving away. So we pushed it to a local restaurant and called for a second tow. I'm pretty sure it was overheating, (the temperature topped out at 103 degrees that day) because it started up a couple hours later.

Saturday was okay. We went to Jen's sister's baby shower, at a church where Jen had had her own when she was pregnant with Lily. Lily was pretty bored, so I mostly just watched her in the cemetery and the playground.

(I'm very disappointed with this cemetery. The nicest feature is a gazebo near the entrance. It has more garbage cans than I've ever seen in a cemetery too. Two stars. I would not recommend it to my friends.)

Lily decided to start pretending to be Wonder Woman near the end of our time on the playground. She tied up the Joker ("tie-tie") and said "That was easy!" It is easy, Batman! It's not that hard to arrest an anorexic clown! Maybe it's time to face up to the fact that maybe you're not the A-1 sauce of crime-fighting! And after that, she said, "Now I'm going to drink some chocolate milk and go down this sliding board." Wonder Woman even knows how to celebrate in style!

Lily woke up in a good mood on Sunday, and as we were going downstairs, she said, "Let's think about what things we have in common and what things are different," so we decided that we both have brown eyes and we're both nice and funny and smart, and we both like the Legion of Superheroes. When we got downstairs, we talked about what she has in common with mommy. Lily said, "We're both girls and we both wear dresses and we both love you," which I thought was very sweet.

Later in the morning, I was trying to finish up a piece on Veronica Mars when Lily came upstairs and looked at the screen and asked me what I was doing. I told her that I was writing a story about a girl who solves mysteries. She said that she didn't want to be in my story, and pointed to a segment where I wrote about Veronica's best friend Lilly Echols. She's getting very good at spelling. Take a look at the bracelet she put together for me on Sunday morning:



Our mechanic works on weekends, so we got Jen's car back, and then went to the mall where we kind of had an ugly incident. I told Lily I would buy her something in the dollar store. She picked up a little thing that looked like a whistle, but I told her not to blow into it and I took it away because it looked like she was going to do it anyway. As soon as I turned my back, she grabbed another one and blew into it, and I told her that's what we would have to buy. She started bawling. She was really very upset, and it's really hard being a parent at times like this. But we paid for it, and met up with Jen, who asked how we were, and Lily was all "Don't tell mommy what happened!"

The troublesome toy
She calmed down somewhat and went into the computer store to buy a car charger for Jen's phone. While she was paying, Lily and I asked her what her favorite candy was. Then we didn't go over to Gertrude Hawk and we didn't buy Jen a birthday present and Lily didn't say "Mommy is going to be DELIGHTED with her present!" when we were done.

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