Our new friend

Every night when we take Sam out of the tub, he wants to "hide" from whoever hasn't been the one to wrap him up in his lion or puppy towel. Basically, I wrap him up, carry him to his room, and tell Daddy that I've lost Sam. Daddy runs in, looks all around the room while Sam hides his face but audibly giggles, and then Sam jumps out and "scares" Daddy.

This game apparently never gets old. Ahh, what joy there must be in being two.

Well, last night it was my turn to get scared. Daddy had Sam wrapped up in the lion towel and I came into the room to search for him. When I looked on the top bunk for him, I noticed the coordinating lion puppet washcloth that we rarely use. I guess I thought I'd mix things up a bit by pretending I'd "found" Sam when I found the little lion.

Sam found this to be hilarious.

Then, he started talking to the lion puppet. Not just "Hi, Lion" like he might usually do, but Sam needed to know his name, where he lives, who his friends are, who his favorite train is, if he wanted to read stories before bed... You get the picture. They made fast friends.

When he got up this morning, we found "Leonard Lewis Lion" neatly arranged on the pillow, where he'd been sleeping. He needs more shut-eye than Sam, as it turns out.

I thought this might be a one night thing, but he was all about Leonard tonight, too. The good news is that he's decided there are no monsters with Leonard by his side. Not quite an imaginary friend, but serving the same purpose, I assume.

It's fine with me. The Monster Spray thing is only fun when you're not getting wet at every turn. Which I was.

I finally got inspired to scrap a story of Sam's arrival today. I realized that I could easily do a whole album on the subject, but I loved how the first page turned out. A nice designer who just retired a couple of weeks ago surprised me with an email that includes links to every single thing she was selling in her store, including several templates, so I used one of them to do this brief journal entry of how we "found" Sam online. People have been telling me to write the story down for a long time and for some reason, I can never do it. It's kind of like the story about what I experienced when I lost my first ectopic pregnancy. It was an overwhelmingly emotional experience and, even being a writer, I've found it hard to commit to paper. Having fun scrap stuff for this page helped me wrap my mind and words around it. Not sure there's a kit for the other story, but maybe someday I'll discover a therapeutic scrap remedy for that one, too...