doll hospital

for a couple of days now, j and i have been seeing tufts of cotton stuffing floating around the house.  we assumed that maggie had torn up on of ains' toys and then hidden it.  we kept looking, cause then we could punish mags for tearing things up but never found anything.


finally, while waking ains up one morning i found some more stuffing in her room and i thought to ask her where it came from.  without even pausing she said 'roger'.  'there's some in roger's clothes too.'  seems i should have asked her earlier!


roger is her baby doll, something a kind, thoughtful parishioner at my last church gave to us during a baby shower.  she has loved this doll, dragged it around with her, babied it, beat it, really played with it lots.  apparently because of all the loving roger has completely separated along his back, accounting for the stuffing spread out across the house.


inadvertently i show ains inside rogers clothes and she gets a little flustered when she sees that roger is hurt.  i explain that roger just needs to go to the doctor and they'll take care of it.  that was my first mistake. 


the doctor is a tangible, known experience for my child.  as soon as those words left my mouth she got very agitated and ran out of her room. turns out she went to the medicine cabinet to get a thermometer and some children's motrin.  'dr mom!  we need to take roger's temperature and give him some medicine before we go!!!'  not.even.kidding.


so i just roll with it.  we take his temp, offer him some medicine and finish getting ready for the day.  then roger has to come downstairs and sit with us while we eat breakfast.  as we're leaving ains realizes roger is not with us.  she pitches a fit because i said roger needed to go to the doctor and so he needs to be in the car.  ok.  then he needs a seatbelt.  thanks to dora we all wear our seatbelts - so we can be safe! (not that there's anything wrong with that).  so driving to daycare i'm headed down the road with a two year old and a doll strapped into my back seat.


this is one of the things i like the most about young children.  they are so literal, very concrete thinkers.  they don't register sarcasm, or jokes, or subtext.  they are the straight men in my comedic life.  at times its frustrating and at times its the best part of this parenting thing.    (other than the little things she repeats - i'm hard as nails mommy.  or the thunder scared me so much i pooted. )


never a dull moment.