Lucy is not quite three, and although she takes after Jim and me in the length department, she is nonetheless dwarfed by her bed now that she upgraded from her crib to the bottom bunk of her twin-sized double-decker bed. (The bunk bed is a statement of hope and purpose: Naomi and Lucy will, God willing, share a room for most or all of their childhood. For now, however, though she is sleeping six or seven hours at a stretch overnight, Naomi is still in her cosleeper bed in the middle of the king mattress in the master bedroom. We’ve demoted her from the top half of the bed to the bottom half, though, so we can hold hands again.)
Because Lucy needs only a tiny corner of her twin mattress to sleep, there is room for many things to be in bed with her. We tuck her in in the dark, and bed-making has not yet made it to onto the list of order-keeping tasks I’m trying to teach her. Her white blanket is oceanically large, full of capacious folds, and she requires only a small corner of it in order to stay warm. If we forget to unplug her light, she gets up after bedtime and tools around her room unsupervised. For all these reasons, it is easy to lose track of just how many objects she has magpied into her bed.
Aside from the usual (pillows, waterproof mattress protector, sheet, blanket), at last count, there were:
– Serus Fots (Serious Fox — she has four identical fox loveys. But over the course of many washings, this one’s fur has matted down over its stitched eyes and mouth in a way that (to Jim and me) looks not only serious, but enraged. Recently Lucy was in bed with one of the other foxes and demanded to sleep with Serus Fots, which my first introduction to the name and was so unexpected and so funny that I went and got him for her without remembering to make her say please.)
– Gray Bear (who used to be as tall as she was and is now only 2/3 her height)
– Winter Bear (from one of Pop-pop’s patients, a bear wearing warm clothing, including a cap with furry earflaps, and with “Belkin” stitched on his vest pocket)
– a hot pink Build-a-Bear from Gigi that plays a recording when she squeezes its paw: “Andrew! Charlie! Gigi! Popop!” in each person’s voice and then “Go Lucy Go! Go Lucy Go go go!” in everyone’s voices, which is a cheer invented for Lucy by Joelle, and was Lucy’s favorite thing to hear for the first year of her life. Its recording had begun to die, and I was going to give it up for lost, but Jim unstitched it and dug out the recording and replaced its not-meant-to-be-replaced battery, which made the recording work again. In the process he and Lucy found the bear’s heart, which Lucy promptly wanted to keep. Then she decided to let the bear have it after all, but once I had stitched up the bear again, she changed her mind and wanted the heart back. So I hand-stitched her a messy small consolation heart stuffed with tissue, from a leftover piece of the fabric my mom and I used to recover my dining room chairs in Durham.
– the dining room chair fabric consolation heart
– Dion (Lion; a lion cub from IKEA)
– Wabbits (two rabbits from IKEA, given by Upup to promote sharing, with the idea that guests can have one and Lucy the other, which has sometimes worked)
– Snoopy (from Jim’s childhood)
– Amy Tatze (Amy Cat, given to us by our Durham neighbor; this one is also called Duke Kitty by Jim for the Duke logo stitched on its rump)
– Awan Titty from Nit and Havwee (Other One Kitty from Nick and Havely, which is yellow, hand-crocheted, comes from Thailand, and has a tiny turquoise bell on a golden thread around its neck that is, amazingly, still attached)
– a green silicon puzzle cube with pieces connected by strings, from the Raleigh Children’s Museum, that Jim bought on his enthusiastic solo trip there (we never did make it with Lucy before moving to Oregon)
– numerous hair ties and clips (“twippies,” which we use whenever we are going to leave the house, to keep the growing-out portion of her bangs off to the side so that she does not look like Ronja the robber’s daughter; at bedtime I ask whether she wants me to take them out so they don’t get tangled and hurt her overnight. She usually says yes, and then when I do take them out, asks “Tan Ducy teep da twippies?” and wants me to give them back to her. I do, and gather the ones from previous evenings when she’s not looking.)
– all the books I have not discovered and confiscated (As of now, there is That’s Not My Kitten!, Bedtime for Frances, the Jesus Story Bible and The Pigeon Needs a Bath Book. If possible she would have every book we own.)
– a scrap of twisted green bubble wrap
– many scraps of a piece of orange tissue paper from one of her Christmas presents
– a translucent orange plastic koi that glows in rainbow colors when you put it in water
– a thick purple piece of rock climbing rope that is hard to bend (neither Jim nor I know how she got this, but I recognize it as one my mom bought a long time ago in Germany because I thought it was pretty)
– a soft, brand-new beach towel printed with bananas on a teal background, given to me by Becky, one of the Bananas, a group of college friends I saw for one evening this past summer on a two-week Mommy-Lucy tour of Minnesota to see friends from St. Olaf whom I hadn’t seen since we graduated
– a nearly-deflated helium balloon shaped like a bear dressed in Christmas clothing (someone promised her a helium balloon as a “yay, you have a little sister!” present, and it took us seven weeks to get out to a place that sold them)
– a full pink metallic heart helium balloon (part of her Christmas present from Auntie Che)
– a tiny string of LED Christmas lights (Jim found this tonight at bedtime and just explained to me that it is not, in the scheme of things, a very big electrical hazard; as he is enormously more cautious than I am and knows more about electrical engineering too, I am not going up right now to remove it)
– wearable reindeer antlers with a broken string of tiny lights
– a red wooden rabbit on wheels with floppy brown leather ears from my childhood
– a tiny red Jeep, the kind you pull back, and then it makes a clicking noise and when you let go, shoots across the floor
– a pair of blue water shoes
– one black slipper
– a two-month-old wrapper from an empty single-serve bag of plain M&Ms, which Lucy has carried with her as though it were pirate gold