ode to bedbaby

i've been lacking for blogging motivation lately, but got a little burst of inspiration from karen over at "ow, my anst" and that's how this little ditty came to be.

for any parent who has a kid who falls truly, madly, deeply in love with an object, when they're a really little kid, you can understand that the object, whether it be a toy, blankie, passie, doll or batman dvd (i saw a kid carrying one around a park one day & his dad said he never ever puts it down) becomes a part of the family. you can't go anywhere without it, you tuck it into bed each night, there's a good chance that it has a name & maybe even a personality or voice.

brooke was a newborn baby when she got her soft bodied doll. i used to tuck it into her crib with her since there were no hard parts and by the time she was 9 months old, we were calling it bedbaby & she was calling it "beeboppy." she loved bedbaby's hands, which are like little mittens with just a thumb & she would rub that thumb onto her lips as she was falling asleep. by the time her first birthday rolled around, bedbaby & brooke were inseparable.

this was on brooke's first birthday

brooke was a very vomitous child & that, added to the fact that she rarely put bedbaby down, resulted in me needing to wash her frequently. this was a problem. so we solved that problem by buying a second baby when we ran across one in a store. then, over the next year or two, we bought 2 more, resulting in us owning 4 bedbabies. i would rotate them out regularly so that all of them would hopefully be equally satisfactory and less than pristine so that brooke wouldn't know that there were in fact 4 babies. but then she found my stash. there was a whole pile of bedbabies in her closet & suddenly, she needed all of them, all the time. this became a frustration because when it was time to go somewhere, she felt the need to round them all up & truck them along with us on our outings. i had to put the kabosh on that pretty quick & she wasn't allowed to take more than 2 out at a time.

the other thing about brooke & her babies is that when she was out of the house with her babies, she would rarely take her thumb out of her mouth if a baby was in her hand. by the time she was 3, i had to forbid her to take them out of the car when we went places so that she wouldn't go into that drone state where she wouldn't talk or interact with the world, would only suck her thumb & go off to la-la-brookie-land.

at some point she decided that she had a favorite out of all the babies & that favorite was chosen based on her thumb. apparently, from how she can explain it now, this particular one has the biggest thumb & therefor it is the most desirable for lip rubbing. she named that one goodbaby. there was a runner-up in the thumb competition & she named that one newbaby since it was the most recently acquired addition to the baby gang that ruled our house. the other two were dubbed otherbaby & otherbaby. they were unappreciated because their thumbs were little more than nubs.

now baby lives only in brooke's bed unless we're going on a trip. she no longer inspires thumb sucking, but she's a source of big comfort and companionship during the dark hours.

there was even a poem written in her honor. my mom wrote it for brooke during bedbaby's hay days, before i started restricting her usage.

EDIT: for any of you who may have been here & read the original post, you'll notice that the poem is gone now.  i didn't ask my mom for permission before posting it & since it's her work, i should have done that. we've been thinking for years about making a book out of it, so maybe one day the bedbaby poem will be back in the form of a baby board book.