Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The Case of the Missing Sophie or The Steel Trap Strikes Again

This is a story from way back. There was Halloween stuff in the stores, to give you some perspective. We were walking into Walmart. Orin was in the child seat of the cart and Isabel was in the cart itself. She knows she is supposed to sit, so when she stood up and started flailing her hands and talking a mile a minute, I stopped the cart. I told her to sit down, doing that terrible parent thing that so many of us do where we tune out the kids in order to make our message heard.
She didn't sit, despite my repeated directions to do so, so I asked her what had her so wound up. She pointed at a shelf to our left and started talking about a giraffe and "some kid". I couldn't see what she was talking about at first, but after a second a small white hoof caught my eye from under the shelf. It turned out to be Sophie the Giraffe. "Some kid" had dropped Sophie and lost her and "was sad without their Sophie." She knows that Orin likes his Sophie and was SO upset about this child being without their beloved Sophie.
I calmed her down enough to suggest that she take Sophie to the customer service desk where they had a lost and found and where the child and his or her parents could find her. This seemed to appease her, so that is what we did. She was very serious as she told the customer service associate that "some kid lost their Sophie and they should be sad without her." The associate wasn't entirely sure what to make of this, so I explained that Sophie was the giraffe's name and how much her brother liked his.
Why am I telling you this story? Well, in spite of her not having mentioned it since about a week after the incident, she started talking about it as though it were yesterday as she picked up our Sophie to put her away this morning.

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