Her Love

Elena loves her blanket.  She adores that piece of cloth so much that we are convinced she couldn't function without it.  Everyone calls it The Magic Blanket, because it is.  If she's crying or upset or tired or hungry or just needing some comfort that thing will bring her into a place of peace and tranquillity.  She has been fiercely attached to it since we moved from Bolivia and would soothe her almost as quickly as breastfeeding.  That's saying a lot.  Her little toddler friend at daycare loves to yank it away from her if she is carrying it around and boy! does he get a reaction.  So much so that Frieda sometimes has to separate the two of them lest she have a complete meltdown.

A few weeks ago, she had the stomach flu.  Yuck!  And of course every night as she lay in her bed, she would throw up.  At least it wasn't all over the carpet in the apartment.  Try as I might, even with laying down towels, she would end up barfing on her blanket, affectionately called Colchita or Colchi.  So we would pry the soggy thing away from the wailing baby and put it in the wash, because really, we had no choice.  And she would cry and sob and scream and finally after 2 hours the blanket was washed and dried and could be reunited with her.

One night, the 4th night of this horrible ritual of barfing/screaming/washing/crying/drying/crying/dried/sleeping, an exasperated Carl whispered, "Just cut the part that isn't vomited on and just give it to her!!".  I almost did, almost.  But I didn't for two reasons:

1) I was afraid of cutting up the pretty blanket that Jenny made for her
2) I knew that it would backfire and instead of being happy with half, she would insist on having the two parts.  This happened with Kezia when we lost her Miss Teddy (again, another ordeal of tears and wailing from a toddler) and we quickly got a 2nd one to replace it.  Well, once the first one was eventually found, she had to have the two of them in order to sleep - no, there was no "extra" one, as we had hoped.

Well, it isn't a soother like Joel or Asha depended on and they eventually parted with their beloved Sooey.  And Kezia, though she loves her Miss Teddies, has grown to sleep without them.  Elena will outgrow this and for now, it's sort of endearing to see how special her lil' Colchita is to her.  We're just hoping that she outgrows her attachment to it before it complete disintegrates......

*because she is so happy when she has it*