Baby Doll

My oldest, who we call giggles, has two objects that she carries around. One is a stuffed teddy bear that I gave to me wife when we were dating that she connected with around her brother's birth. She was eighteen months old and needed/wanted that bear all the time. She could even distinguish him from another bear that we had who had a pink bow instead of red. In all other ways they were the same, but she knew which one was Uh-oh (the name that we gave the bear and one of only four words that she could say at the time: the others were mama, dada, and baby). The other is a doll that she got for her second Christmas. She was named Baby doll to distinguish her from the other babies in her young life (what with cousins and siblings). Baby doll is not a soft doll, she has a solid core with a speaker to coo at you with. Her head and arms all move when she is cooing.

Last week baby doll had the most unfortunate thing happen. She was beheaded. More specifically the piece that kept her mechanically rotating head connected broke. Giggles was very sad but, since mommy was still asleep, I told her that we would try to fix her later. I had mentioned to my wife the possibility of taking Baby doll apart and stuffing her as a Christmas gift this last Christmas but we never did get around to it. As it was now a necessity, I figured something needed to be done. When mom woke up and the day slowed down I got to work.

One of baby dolls arms had already been broken so I started by breaking the other. If I was going to fix her I might as well get rid of the hard core, especially since it no longer was attached to the head. I ripped out, as delicately as I could, the solid pieces of baby doll. It took a lot of cutting and careful force in an attempt to not damage the outward appearance of the doll. Her head and neck especially took a while as I tried to figure out how to reconnect it. Finally with all unneeded parts stripped and in most cases broken, I had to come up with a way to get her back together. How do you reconnect a head to a body that is not made to be connected. Well, I used on old coat hanger. I made a nice loop that would fill much of the head and make it so that it would not be easily detached. Then folded it so that it went down some of the length of the arms. I destroyed an old pillow for stuffing and the sewed the body together. The coat hanger couldn't be pulled out of the body because of the width of the coat hanger in the arm and the head could not be pulled off because of the circular form.

Giggles did not have Baby doll for bed that night because I was still working on attaching the head, stuffing, and sewing. I was done, for the most part, before I went to bed and relatively pleased with myself. The next morning I presented baby doll to my daughter before leaving to work. For one day Baby doll was the best thing ever (again) and now she is just that second object that is always there. I think Giggles knew that there was a possibility that Baby doll was gone forever.

Why women are always colder than men.

I was folding laundry this morning with a pile for me, my wife, and each of our three kids. It was whites and so most of it was stuff for my wife and I but I was taken back by how much higher my pile was then hers. It seemed like I had folded about the same amount of clothes for each of us.

As I started folding a shirt of mine, after having folded one of my wife's, I realized why my pile was larger. He clothes were normally very thin especially in comparison to mine. That is when the thought struck me, "is she trying to freeze?" I know that she is not, but it explain a lot about why she steals my clothes when she is cold or sick.

A new job

I started a new job yesterday. It is going well and very different from what I expected (that's a good thing). I would tell you more but my apartment building loss power and so the long write up that I had was lost. I would retype it but I am tired.

Mty wife and I have decided to get more involved in our ward since being released from Nursery. As such we went to ward temple night this week, and I went shooting with the Elder's quorum two weeks ago. It has been a lot of fun. Tomorrow I will be getting up early to play basketball with one of our wards two basketball teams (Stake Basketball). I am pretty sure that I am going to regret this. I am not good at basketball. Not just because I'm not a very talk man but also because it is something that I have known since sixth grade (and maybe even before that). There is a reason that I player baseball growing up and was a back-row player in Volleyball in High school. Those are places where since is less important. I even got shown up by one of my companions on my mission, and he was from Honduras. Not that Honduras makes people bad at basket ball but he was that classic short latino, except he dribbled circles around me. At least I told them that I would only be there so that everyone had a chance to sit out every once and a while.