Friday, September 01, 2006

Fixing Nemo

When you're two, a traumatic experience is defined quite differently than for the rest of the population. Take last night's extreme drama for example:

It all started out innocently enough...Grandma Dee-Dee sent us a package in the mail. Inside, among other things, were two fun little bathtime toys, these little clown fish that you can wind up and make swim. Bree was instantly in love with them, calling them Nemo and carrying them around all day. Somewhere along the way though, she managed to break off the fin of one fish. It was pretty easily fixed however, we'd just shove the fin back on and that would last us a good 15-30 minutes before the fin was off and needing attention again. This tactic worked fine, until bedtime that is. Brianna insisted on taking the fish to bed and there, inevitably, she'd manage to get the fin to fall off and cry. A half an hour and 2 breakdowns later Travis and I were frantically trying to figure out a solution. Finally, I went in there and took the broken fish, telling Bree that he was sick and needed to go see the doctor and that he'd be back in the morning. (I was hoping this would give me some time to either figure out how to fix the fin permanently or "accidentally misplace" that particular fish, hoping she'd forget about it.) But, this didn't fly. As we listened to her little broken-hearted sobs it suddenly occured to me to give Nemo a band-aid. So, there I was at 8:45 pm frantically attaching a Sesame Street band-aid on a plastic bath-toy fish and praying it would hold the little fin on. And, it did! I headed back into Bree's room and jauntily told her that Nemo had been to the doctor, gotten a band-aid and was much better now. Fifteen minutes later I smiled in the complete silence and tried to savor getting to be the hero...at least for the moment.

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