Week 11 Day 4: Beware Big Bear

Today was largely disappointing, although the disappointment had nothing to do with Gavin. I somehow managed to miss an important appointment completely by writing the wrong time down on my calendar. And that kind of put me in a funk for the rest of the day. Thankfully I had Gavin with me, and he's a pretty happy dude and is also soft and cute and has a really good smelling neck. Among other positive attributes. I was going to bring him to my appointment, which would have made that today's Big Outing. But since we missed that I took Gavin to the library where we poked into the children librarian's office to tell her how much we enjoyed Baby Time and how the only reason we haven't been there for the past month is because Gavin decided that 9:15 would be a good time to be asleep for his first nap of the day. She remembered Gavin's name, which was sweet. She then encouraged Gavin to go say hello to Big Bear and maybe play with some puzzles.

Here's the thing about Big Bear. He is, quite literally, a giant stuffed teddy bear and he sits on the floor next to one of the bookshelves. Children flock to him and crawl on him and sit on his lap and in general writhe all over his existence. As a result, Big Bear is Big Gross. He's a lice outbreak waiting to happen. He's a fuzzy flu magnet. He is very visibly dirty. I have no doubt that he harbors every conceivable bodily fluid children can muster in at least trace amounts. Needless to say, I don't encourage Gavin to interact with Big Bear. Thus far he has shown no interest and I am thankful for that.

Big Bear reminds me of a bear Laura and I had when we were really young kids. I'm thinking 4 or 5. Somebody, maybe one of our aunts or uncles, won this enormous (though probably not nearly as big as I remember him being) stuffed bear. He was stuffed with styrofoam pellets rather than, well, whatever stuffing is. He was orange with a white tummy and white bottoms of his feet. He had a red tongue. We thought he was awesome. Unfortunately, he was clearly made to be won by some macho guy throwing baseballs into apple baskets at a state fair so that said guy could give it to his girlfriend and two months later when they break up said bear could end up in a dumpster behind an apartment building somewhere. He was not made to withstand two hyper four-year-olds with lax parental supervision. I remember him being relegated to the basement when a seam ripped and styrofoam pellets puffed into the air like carcinogenic snow and covered everything in the immediate area. My parents wanted to get rid of him, but we begged and begged. Thus the new basement home. For whatever reason my sister and I decided to "polish" the bear's feet with black shoe polish we found in the basement (remember, again, that lax supervision). And that was the cause of a mysterious (at the time) end for the big orange bear who probably had a name far more clever than Big Bear. I now know that he was huddled out in the middle of the night and deposited in a dumpster. Where, as I said, he belonged all along, if not for the maniacal love of two little girls.

Gavin and I did play with puzzles at the library. They have a bunch of wooden puzzles on short-people tables for the kids to play with. Gavin doesn't quite get puzzles yet, even the ones where it is very clear that, say, the alligator piece goes on top of the exact same picture of the alligator that was below it when you lifted up the piece to begin with. Mostly I stacked the pieces on top of each other and Gavin knocked them down. Because children love destruction. When I put Gavin on the floor to check out the books, he immediately pulled the book What Daddy's Can't Do off of the shelf. It's basically about a kid and his dad -- actually they're some kind of alligator-looking dinosaur -- and the kid is listing all of the things Dad "can't" do, like go to bed without a kiss goodnight, read books by himself, etc. I read it to Gavin, though he wasn't super interested. I did think it was kind of an ironic choice, however.