Fred Drama

If my house caught on fire, I can tell you what I would save, I wouldn't even think twice.  I would save Fred and Ned.  Unfortuantely, I would probably die trying to find them.

If you don't know much about our family you are probably wondering "what are these hiding creatures?".  If you do know us, you probably understand why I say that.  Fred and Ned are the glue that hold our house together.

This is Fred:

This is one of my all-time favorite pictures of Kira

Fred is Kira's very best friend.  She NEEDS him!  She gets quite dramatic when we can't find him (which seem to be always).  We had four....  Then three...  I think we are down to two now...  And I swear they hide.  Luckily, she is yet to differentiate between them, so as long as I have one, we are good.  She has, in fact, been known to wander around and find them all and cuddle them.  She also gets extremely distressed when they happen to fall under the bed in the middle of the night.  This has somehow happened multiple times and is also very distressing to mama when she can't find him in the dark either.

But that is neither here nor there.  Back to the point at hand:

This is Ned:

Really, Ariana could care less about Ned.  He sometimes amuses her, but what she really wants is the binky attached to him.  I can't take credit for this.  There were many moons of severe frustration as I frantically felt in and around the crib looking for the dang binky.  I tried hooking it to her shirt to no avail.  She would just roll over and pull it off.  Steve, brilliant as he is, came up with the idea to clip it to Ned, thereby making it much harder to lose.  For the record, the original binkies are still stuck on Ned, we haven't lost one since.  And I can almost always find it on the dark quickly, so that I can pop the bink back in her mouth and go back to bed, the most important thing in the mama life. Haha.  I told you, Brilliant.

Well, in the hubbub of trying to get out the door with two small children, Aria often ends up carrying everything with her in her carrier.  Well, just light stuff, like jackets we are bringing but not wearing, juice cups, and even (dum dum DUM) Fred.  Normally she takes no notice as she is generally grumpy in the carrier unless it is moving, however, yesterday something must have caught her eye. She found...  a Fred foot.  Both Fred and Ned have three little "feet", areas where the material is drawn together.  When Kira was younger, these feet spent an inordinate amount of time in her mouth (thus the nasty faded color despite my frequent washing).  Nowadays (and kind of more hilarious), the Fred feet spend most of their time in her ears or tapping against her nose.  These are our best indications that she needs a nap.  Strange child.  Anyway, since I can't seem to stay on topic tonight, Ariana found none other than a Fred foot and did what she does with everything: stuck it in her mouth.  Kira usually gets pretty upset if she sees anyone else touching Fred, but she was outraged to find someone else chewing on him.  She threw a huge toddler temper tantrum, yanked him away, and gave Aria a serious stink eye.  And then, she tried out the Fred foot.  Only to find that it was ruined. RUINED!  (insert all the toddler drama you can muster).  She threw him on the ground and has since had nothing to do with him.  Now, poor lonely Fred is hanging out in the laundry room waiting for a bath that will hopefully wash off all of the sister germs so that he can be played with.

Who knew toddlers could be so crazy/attached/dramatic?  Oh man, such fun to look forward to in about 13 years.  Steve and I both had to leave the room because we were laughing so hard.  Poor Kira and her cheating Fred.  Luckily, we have extras so the drama was short lived.  And they all four still love each other: