Good bye Elephant

When Neena brought to my attention that my sidebar needed to be updated I noticed the picture of Ruby with her elephant. I've been meaning to post about this, but never had.

Here is the story of Ruby and her elephant:

Ruby was probably our worst baby ever. This is probably a horrible thing to say; but it's very true. Maybe she was colicky; I don't know, but she cried a lot. I had a hard time calming her down when she got upset. She did not like to be cuddled; so I couldn't rock her to sleep. Sometimes I literally spent hours trying to get her to go to sleep. Then there were nights she would wake up screaming and it didn't seem like there was anything I could do for her.

One evening we were doing our grocery shopping at Winco and Ruby was starting in on one of her screaming fits and we still hadn't finisher our shopping yet. We passed the stuffed animal section and I snatched a soft and comfy looking elephant. It was grey with a ribbon around it's neck and tusks and had that mixture of loose stuffing and beans. At the time it was probably about as big as her. I think she was somewhere around 10 months at the time. When I gave her the elephant she stopped her fit and was good for the rest of our shopping experience. It was love at first sight! From then on she slept with her elephant every night and she took it everywhere with her.

As a baby she would suck on the tusks when she was sleepy. When she got too old for that she would just rub the tusks with her hands; sometimes I would catch her making a sucking movement with her mouth as she did this. Through the years, the many trips it took, the washings it got and from much loving it became very wore out. She still loved it though. It reminded me of the velveteen rabbit. It's ribbon got lost somewhere along the way; and it's fur wasn't its original silky softness, but she loved it all the same.

There were times she would leave it somewhere and we would have to turn around and go get it. There were a few times as she got older that she would leave it and wouldn't miss it for awhile; but most of the time she took it everywhere with her.

Well, we took it with us to go to Brewster camp out this year. We made a lot of stops along the way, of course. The last stop we made was in Omak to get groceries for the weekend. We really couldn't quite remember if that was the last place we saw the elephant or not; but we were pretty sure Ruby took it in with her. Sometimes we remembered to tell her to leave her elephant in the van so she wouldn't lose it; this time we forgot. It was pretty late and we were quite a ways out of Omak when Ruby realized she didn't have her elephant. This time we didn't turn around (I almost wish we had). We weren't even definitely sure she had it in Wal-Mart and we were already going to be getting in so late. We did call Wal-Mart, but they hadn't found it yet. When we got to the camp out we looked in the van really good, but no elephant. We stopped at Wal-Mart on our way home, but it had not been found. We stopped at a few other places that we remembered stopping at, but nobody had seen Ruby's elephant. It was so tattered and worn that someone who found it might have just thrown it out, not knowing that it was such a special thing to a little 4 year old girl.

I realize it was probably getting to be time to ween Ruby of her elephant; but she loved it so much that I wanted to be able to keep it for her to have when she had children of her own. I really feel sad that she lost it. This may seem kind of silly, but I even have a small hope that somehow God will allow us to find it so that Ruby can keep her beloved elephant. It wasn't even a toy to her. She very rarely played with it. Sometimes she would say that elephant was hungry or tired; but most of the time elephant was just a comforting companion for her.

She's doing fine without elephant, but she still sometimes tells me that she wishes she had elephant. We really do miss that poor old elephant. I'm going to post some pictures that I have of Ruby with her elephant. Most of the time we made her put the elephant down, but we have a few. Now I wish I would have taken more of her with it as a baby.

Elephant at Uncle Brian and Aunt Michelle's house

Elephant at Dennis and Trina's house

Elephant at the pumkin patch

Elephant at the airport.