a tale of two chocolates

Juniordwarf has a lot of teddies. (The teddies are his vast collection of soft toys, ranging from my old panda through many different species including tigers, a frog and several actual teddies. This is as opposed to the animals, which are all his plastic animals.)

Different ones have been his favourites at different times, and their names have changed over the years as well.

He has a teddy called Chocolate-the-Girl and a teddy called Chocolate-the-Boy. I don’t know where these names came from, or why he thought Chocolate was a unisex name – or even a name at all – but those names have stuck.

Chocolate-the-Boy came from one of those grabby prize machines that they have in pubs. Juniordwarf somehow managed to win it when he and Slabs went to the pub for a meal one night when I was away. Slabs says he didn’t even see Juniordwarf do it (but he’s since repeated the performance in another machine and we still have no idea how he managed it other than pure fluke).

Chocolate-the-Girl’s origin is a mystery. We think one of Slabs’ cousins gave her to us for Juniordwarf when he was a baby. She is actually Zoe from Sesame Street http://www.sesamestreet.org/muppets/zoe , but Juniordwarf hasn’t watched much Sesame Street and doesn’t know the characters. When he found out she was Zoe, he said that must be her nickname.

I think he is particularly fond of Chocolate-the-Girl because she has long hair that he can twist around and put up (just like he tries to do with mine). Ever since he’s been very young he’s been completely hung up on particular women we know, and obsessed about whether their hair is up or down. The most important thing he reports back on each day at school is what his teacher was wearing in her hair that day.

I’m just glad he doesn’t know about those old Barbie hairstyling sets that were popular when I was younger.

Earlier in the year, when lots of his classmates were taking their teddies to school, Chocolate-the-Girl was the one Juniordwarf took to school every day. A couple of months ago he told me that Chocolate-the-Girl would be staying home with me on my work from home day. So I got into the spirit of this, and took some photos of her to show him what she did during the day. He thought it was great.

 A couple of days later, Juniordwarf wanted me to take Chocolate-the-Boy to work, so I did the same thing for him.

 After that, Chocolate-the-Girl became a regular visitor to my workplace, and Chocolate-the-Boy started to accompany Slabs.

Yesterday Chocolate-the-Boy was supposed to go to work with Slabs. Slabs told Juniordwarf to leave him on his bag. He didn’t, and Chocolate-the-Boy got left at home.

When Slabs picked Juniordwarf up, he’d been trying to think of a story to explain why Chocolate-the-Boy wasn’t with him. Last week, my reason for Chocolate-the-Girl having been left at home already being at home when we got there was that she’d got a headache at my work and had to come home early, on the bus. He was fine with that.

Juniordwarf saved Slabs the trouble of coming up with an equally plausible explanation. He said that Chocolate-the-Boy had gone to the moon and he wouldn’t be back until Monday. Problem solved.

Today Chocolate-the-Girl was meant to come to work with me. I decided to put her in the drink holder of my bag so she could see where we were going while I was walking to work.

This was all very well until I was almost at work and discovered her missing.

The absolute gut-wrenching horror that fell upon me at that moment is indescribable.

My reaction was sheer and utter panic.

All I could think about was how devastated my little boy was going to be when I told him Chocolate-the-Girl had gone and really wasn’t coming back, and how betrayed he’d feel that he’d entrusted me with his teddy and I’d lost her.

I was almost in tears as I started retracing my steps. I was hoping that she hadn’t fallen out on the road and been run over, or that someone hadn’t found her and decided to keep her for their kids.

It was an unbearable walk. I was getting more and more frantic as I scanned the street and the road for any sign on Chocolate-the-Girl. It brought to mind this blog post I read recently about a small girl who had lost her beloved toy dog, http://www.handsfreemama.com/2011/10/18/a-well-loved-child/ and the impact that had on her mother, as she realised that a day would come that her daughter wouldn’t need her teddy any more, wouldn’t want to hold her hand any more . . .

But I digress.

I was imagining what I was going to say to Juniordwarf, where I was going to go for coffee to calm myself down before I went into work, whether I’d even be able to handle going to work knowing I’d made this terrible mistake, and indeed, even trying to explain why I was so upset about losing a teddy bear, and why on earth I was bringing my child’s teddy to work in the first place, I mean who does that? Really?

I was on the last leg of the return trip when I saw a flash of orange. It was Chocolate-the-Girl. She was sitting on the ground propped up against a fence, so someone had obviously found her, seen (by the fact that Juniordwarf’s name was written on her tag) that she did belong to someone, realised that the owner would probably be back as soon as they realised she was gone, and moved her out of the way so she didn’t get wrecked.

 I was totally relieved. Beyond relieved. There must be a word to describe the relief. It was the exact opposite feeling I’d had when I discovered her missing.

I picked her up and gave her a hug.

Yes, I actually hugged a small soft toy.

I was so grateful to whoever found her and left her there for me to find. I thanked them on Twitter and I thank them again here. They will most likely never read this, but I’m sending them positive thoughts, thanks and well wishes for their honesty. It made my day.

The only other good thing to come out of this is that I covered so much ground, my day’s walking was done before I even got to work.

I didn’t let Chocolate-the-Girl out of my sight for the rest of the day. This included her sitting in on our staff meeting and coming shopping with me at lunchtime, much to the amusement of my colleagues.

When Juniordwarf asked what Chocolate-the-Girl had done today I decided not to mention her escapade. He was just happy knowing she’d been with me.

Lake Dobson

I'm linking up to Kim's Sunday Selections at Frogpondsrock today.

Last time we went to Mt Field National Park we drove the 16 km road to Lake Dobson but we didn't have a good look around.

Monday was a public holiday, so we decided it might be nice to go back up there and do the circuit around the lake. The official title of the walk is the Pandani Grove Nature Walk, and it skirts around one side of the lake, passing through the Pandani Grove, and ending up on the 4WD track that goes higher up the mountain (or back to the car park in our case).

This is the area that gets snow in winter, and it has several long day walks that we aren't quite ready to tackle just yet. The drive up to the lake takes you from the beautiful lush rainforest at the bottom of the park through changing vegetation to the completely different sub-alpine landscape higher up the mountain. The change over such a short space is remarkable.

I took my old SLR camera with me - I don't remember the last time I used it. When Juniordwarf was about a year old, I think. I haven't had those photos developed yet, so here are some that I took with my phone and uploaded to Instagram.

P365 - Day 240 - some of what we did today

This morning I looked into Juniordwarf's room and this is what I saw:

He said he was lining up all the numbers. He'd obviously run out of room at the bed and had to continue the sequence under his bed. He was taking one number or one picture under his bed at a time, then emerging (backwards) to get the next one.

Today was a pretty quiet Sunday, so I decided to post a few pictures of what we did.

Inspired by an Instagram friend, we did chalk shadow drawings.

Slabs created his own artwork.

Juniordwarf and I went on a two hour walk and explored the (disused) local railway line along the way.

I wasn't sure if we should go, as the sky looked like this:

We looked at the daffodils when we got home.

And after all that collapsed on the couch.

P365 - Day 205 - the scrapbooking shop is closed

Earlier this week I wrote about how Juniordwarf loves to describe the route to wherever we’re going in great detail. He does it in the car and he does it when we walk Sleepydog.

Yesterday when we were out walking with Sleepydog, Juniordwarf asked if we could walk to one of the streets we usually drive to. I said we could, but that it would be easier if we went without Sleepydog, since she’s not the easiest dog to walk.

He agreed with that, and this morning said he wanted to walk to that street, which is close to the centre of town, more than two kilometres from our house. I agreed and decided that since we were going that way we might as well do a couple of errands at the same time, to save someone driving.

So we set off, after me telling Slabs he might need to be on alert to come and pick us up if it got a bit much for Juniordwarf. Juniordwarf was very excited, setting out our route before we went, and telling me how we would also walk past the scrapbooking shop so he could see the sign in the window.

He has quite a thing for the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ signs displayed in various shop doors, and every time we drive past any of the shops that he’s become interested in (there are several regulars), he checks to see whether the shop is open or closed, whether the lights are on or off and whether the blinds are up or down.

The scrapbooking shop in our town is his main focus, but he’s also amused by the op shop next door (or in Juniordwarfspeak 'the dressing shop'), which has another sign in its door that partly obscures the ‘open/closed’ sign, giving the impression that the shop is either ‘pen’ or ‘losed’. This provides him with hours of entertainment.

When we got to the scrapbooking shop, he spent an amazing amount of time looking through the window ‘at the stuff’, and at the sign. A couple of people passing by gave us strange looks, and I wasn’t sure if they thought we might be casing the place (fingers crossed that the shop doesn’t get broken into any time soon, or Juniordwarf might receive a visit from the cops . . .).

He’s very excited because I’m going to print some photos of him and his best friend so that he can do his own scrapbooking page. I told him that once we get the photos he can pick out some paper from the shop to do his page, and he’s really looking forward to that.

Once I managed to drag him away from the shop, we did a tour down the main street, so he could examine the doors of all the other shops to see if they were open or closed, on the way to the DVD store to return some DVDs for Slabs.

Juniordwarf said he wanted to look at the numbers. Not being a regular in that shop, I had no idea what he meant, until he dragged me into the shop, to the wall where the top 100 DVDs are displayed. He then walked along that wall counting from one to one hundred (which Slabs says he’s done before), and then all the way back again counting back to one (which is a new development).

Then he was ready to go.

After another detour, we headed for home. We weren’t far from home when I noticed him lagging a bit. He said, ‘I need to be carried.’ 

I managed to convince him that he didn’t. My back would not have thanked me for lugging a four year old the rest of the way home. So we made it home under our own steam and I didn't need rescuing. All in all, about a five kilometre round trip.

Not a bad morning walk.