Quinlan woke up overly early this morning. Despite being a little on the fragile side, she was doing fairly well, but while flipping through a book of older pictures of herself she ran across one of her and Big Elephant. Big Elephant is a very large stuffie that came into the house as a baby gift for Celeste; of course, since Big Elephant (as the name implies) is not a dog, it eventually became Quinn's. For a long time BE served as bed and/or covers for Quinlan, sleeping either on top of or under it, but for the past 9 months or so, BE's been more or less an afterthought, stuffed in a basket with other less-favored stuffies.
When she saw the picture, Q started to get choked up and said, "I wish I could cry" [blogger's note: she can, just for some reason the drama meant she couldn't] "because I haven't seen Big Elephant in so long …" After a short discussion, in which she insisted that BE was lost/had been taken away/had been given to the thrift store, Q went upstairs to check the basket of stuffies in her room and then, shortly thereafter, came bounding down the stairs dragging along Big Elephant.
There was playing and laughter and then, eventually, came the morning insight into a child's mind:
Q: You know? As I get older, my stuffies seem a little less real. I mean, Big Elephant used to be real, but not … I mean, when I was little I used to pretend that if I wanted something, it could come out of Big Elephant's nose … and it really would!
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