What Has Happened to My Child??

It has been a loooooong time since I have posted. For a variety of reasons I will decline to indulge you in. But, in the time between my last post and now, something has happened to Anja. She has completely transformed. She's like one of those magic pets that grow before your eyes...all you have to do is add water. Except, in Anja's case, I added soy milk, toast and bananas.

(I remember putting the tiny little dinosaur in a big glass mixing bowl of warm water and then coming back two days later to find a slimy, gelatinous, oversized creature that looked like it was ready to burst forth from the comfortable womb that was the mixing bowl. Ah, memories.)

Anyway, as annoying as it is to receive unsolicited advice from old men in the PVC piping aisle at Lowe's Hardware, it is true what they tell you: "Enjoy it...it goes fast."

I might note, too, that the after picture of Anja shown above is not a representation of routine. I simply placed her in the Bumbo to have a frame of reference for her size difference. In fact, she was upsidedown within moments, trying to get the thing off her butt.

Creepy Dolls and an Entirely Unrelated Story of a Stuffed Bunny

We were recently in a local toy store here in North Bend when we came upon the doll section. It made me reminisce about being a little girl and pretending to mother various stuffed animals, namely BunBun (a rabbit) and Tigor (a tiger). Once, I lost BunBun in our apartment complex and went so far as to post "Lost Bunny" signs all over the place. I was determined. Amazingly, we got a call back. A little girl close to my age found him in the playground. I remember going to her house to pick BunBun up and she had placed him dotingly in a basket and put a bonnet upon his head. I abruptly took him from the basket and removed the bonnet. No one was going to dress my bunny.

This led me to realize that I have no memory of any particular dolls I had as a child. Not because I didn't have any but because I think I really found them creepy. Much like these (see photo). I just can't picture some little girl seeing these and saying to her mother, "Mommy, pleeeeeease can I have the dolls with the plastic bags over their heads? Pleeeease?!"

I find the choice in packaging morbidly hilarious. I snickered as I approached them to get a closer look. I had so many questions. Why are there two of them? Are they twins? Is the fact that one has its mouth open supposed to illustrate the aftermath of what having a bag on your head might look like? What might that lesson sound like? Okay, kids, now this one is a normal baby (referring to the closed-mouth doll). And this one is a baby after a plastic bag has been on its head for a period of time (ahem, referring to the, uh, open-mouthed doll). And I find it eerily coincidental that their attire is blue. Is it a subliminally macabre reference to asphyxia? I will never know. The wheels keep turning. While they do, I am going to try and forget the images these creepy little dolls invoke. Maybe I should go cuddle with BunBun...