After weeks of mourning his loss he showed back up..........much to Mother's dismay. He was found by Aubrey herself, stashed inside the coffee table. No one has opened that table in ages........or so we thought. Apparently somebody has. Aubrey was standing around the other day just messing with stuff as always. As she was opening up the table for no apparent reason a pink floppy bear leg popped out...having been stuffed way too tightly into the given area. She threw open the table and out he flew. She was quite ecstatic, to say the least. I have to admit I think I was about as happy as she was. I just wanted the opportunity to at least save him. And though in his absence he motivated me to get rid of still more more stuff I don't think I'm really ready to trash him. I have a vision of eventually making a shadow box for each one of the children and in it placing the 1st outfit they ever wore, along with a copy of their footprints, a lock of hair from their 1st haircut and their cherished, raggedy toy.
New Bear vs Old Bear...we had an extra one of these that my sister had given us a long time ago as a backup bear that we had forgotten about. Here is what Aubrey's bear looked like when Uncle Ben gave it to her as a baby gift and here it is after 4 1/2 yrs of intense love.
For Grayson his cherished needed sleeping item was a diaper rag. He had to lay his head on a diaper rag or he wouldn't go to sleep. He did that until he was 3 1/2. It wasn't any one specific one. It could be any of his but it just had to be a diaper rag laid out on his mattress and eventually his pillow. I still have one that has his name on it from having labeled it during the many years I worked in the nursery and had his stuff up there with me. For Evye, it was a big pink bunny. She was as attached to that as Aubrey is to her bear, though Evye gave Bunny up a little sooner than Aubrey ever would've willingly given up Bear. Aubrey still cries for Bear, though not nearly like she did. And sweet Bethany sent Aubrey a bear that she is now sleeping with. So, it kind of curbed the bear longing at night though it is not quite the mandatory "pacifier" that her original bear had become. She calls it her "new bear" but is content to only sleep with it and not drag it around all day risking losing it.
Believe it or not this is the exact same bear...off the shelf vs being used as a paci for 4 yrs
So, now having the real thing back I allowed her to sleep with it one night and then told her Bear was going away for good. Not wishing to lead her to believe something totally wrong I just flat out told her that he was going up in the closet forever since she was a big girl now and that way he didn't ever get lost again. She fought it and cried about it and still asks for him but it's not the sobbing of when she first lost him. So it is that Aubrey's raggedy old Bear is tucked safely into the closet and will eventually be framed to remember and cherish.
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