Pleading Insanity

I must be crazy.

I have to be.

There is no other explanation.

My daughter is sick yet again (spring just can't get here soon enough!) and running another fever. Over 101 degress. The poor kid's just been miserable all day. At one point, she was at 102 degress. I should've realized it when she barely ate breakfast, laid on the sofa for more than five minutes, and burst into tears when I wouldn't get her clothes right away. She's a drama queen, but not nearly that dramatic.

But it didn't all click at first. Then I noticed her face was flushed. Hand to the forehead. Poor kid. No wonder she was so sensitive.

So, she had to miss the Fun Fair at school that she'd been looking forward to all week. A little teary over it, but I think she just felt too lousy to do much more than that. So, doting mother that I am, I went out and got her Gatorade (her version of comfort food - it's the one thing she asks for when she's sick) and while I was out I got her a new box of crayons and a coloring book. We sat and colored for a while, then I tucked her in bed with the DVD player, Pinocchio and her favorite stuffed friends, and her blanket - Pink. Yes, the blanket has a name. And a personality. Pink, believe it or not, is a boy. Am I raising a kid who doesn't believe in gender stereotypes or what? And that is the blanket's name. We have Pink and Green. Both are fleece blankets that she's had since she was two weeks old and a newborn respectively. Green was a baby shower gift. Liked it so much I went and bought Pink. Now I've adopted them both.

But, as usual, I digress...

Sooo, I gave her some Children's Advil. Little by little the fever came down. It was hovering around 100 degrees when I put her in bed for the night. She'd been watching Toy Story 2 in Mommy and Daddy's room (a big treat), and went back to her room to go to bed quite willingly. Poor kid was wiped out.

So, I get Pink and Green, and the sixteen stuffed animals she wanted, and cart them from our room to hers. Get her settled. Well, one of the animals fell off the bed (huge surprise, considering she has a twin bed and 87 stuffed creatures sharing it with her. Not to mention Pink and Green.). Ok - no big deal.

Right.

Kohl's does this Kohl's for Kids thing where they sell stuffed animals and books for $5 and all the proceeds go to children's charities - so I don't mind buying them on a regular occasion. We have a Sam-I-Am and Max, and countless teddy bears and sheep and aardvarks and stuff like that floating around because if you buy for one, you have to buy for the other.

The most recent one is Sandra Boynton's animals. I love her books. I bought them for my daughter when she was younger, and now for my son (who loves the way they taste more than he cares for the actual words inside). So I bought a hippo for my son, and this dog in a railroad engineer's hat for her.

This dog is the one who hit the floor.

So, I'm getting my daughter settled in and then... well... let's just say she was sick to her stomach.

The dog never knew what hit it.

Ugh.

Well, I cleaned up the mess (one of the worst jobs EVER, I might add. You'd think I'd be used to it. Nope.) and brought the dog down into the kitchen. No problem. She has T-Bone, from the Clifford books (also bought at Kohl's - along with Clifford, Cleo, and Max), and he suffered a similar fate a few years back. You'd never know it to look at ol' T-Bone.

Conductor dog wasn't so fortunate.

T-Bone was only slightly wounded. Conductor dog was beyond trashed. DOA.

I had no choice. He had to go.

Now, I loved The Velveteen Rabbit as a kid and I still like to think that, once a stuffed animal is loved, it becomes real. Crazy? Maybe, but who cares? And I felt as guilty as hell about having to get rid of Conductor dog, partly because my daughter absolutely loves this guy.

But he had to go.

To make it worse, it's raining out tonight. Talk about depressing.

So, I truck the garbage to the Dumpster and tell my other half to dig out the Kohl's flyer from earlier in the week. During Christmas, they are open until midnight. Maybe, just maybe, they are open past ten on a Saturday night (this was at 10:25, or 11:25 if you were in my kitchen. My husband likes to get a head start on the time change thing.)

What do you know?

They are open until 11 tonight!

Now, if someone had told me that there would be a time in my life when I'd be in the car, on a rainy Saturday night, at almost eleven PM, driving to a department store to replace a barfed-on stuffed dog, I'd have told them they were crazy. I'd never do anything so ridiculous.

It was almost eleven when I pulled into the Kohl's lot. Great parking at that hour, by the way.

Thank God they still had the Boynton animals.

Conductor Dog #2 is sitting on my sofa.

I think I'll keep him there until my daughter's feeling a little better.