The twins each have a comfort item that they take to bed at night and carry with them in the car. Emily has two, actually: A stuffed puppy dog and a baby doll. She gives a lot of kisses, so it takes two dolls to be on the receiving end of her affections. Madeline has one very treasured bear. It was once white with a red sweater and two jingle bells sew onto his scarf. Many years ago, when it was given to to my oldest child by my grandmother, it would play “Jingle Bells” when you pressed a little sensor in its hand.
This seasonally-attired bear has been loved on pretty intensely, first by Logan and for the last year by Madeline. The scarf and bells are miraculously still attached, although the musical mechanism inside the bear no longer play a tune.
So why should this bear make me rich one day? Because it is the luckiest stuffed bear on the planet.
It’s been lost and recovered again three times! Crazy, right?
The first time we lost it on a trip to the mall. We were pretty sure it was flung from the stroller somewhere in Sears. My husband was a true daddy-hero and scoured the store until he found it. Smiles all around.
A few weeks after lucky bear’s first time being saved from permanent loss, I was on an afternoon/evening full of errands with the kids after work. I had on-the-go dinners for the girls of Lunchable-style snacks while we drove an hour to the next county for my son’s lacrosse game. After dropping him off at the field, we bought groceries and returned a shirt at the mall. Then we collected the older kiddo from his game and drove him through In N Out for dinner before heading home. Somewhere in our travels, between 4:00 and 9:00, the bear disappeared. Having called every store we visited, I eventually tracked this lucky little fuzzball down at In N Out. He had been flung (again) by Madeline out of the car door while we were waiting in the drive-thru. I had hopped out of the car in the middle of the drive-thru and opened the van’s slider for only a moment that had fallen to the floor. That was apparently enough time for Madeline to give her bear a heave-ho before I got in the car again and pulled forward. When he came home, the bear had black tire and pavement marks across his fur but he was otherwise in good shape.
You’d think we would learn our lesson and stop letting Madeline take the bear with her on excursions. Nah, we’re not the learnin’ types. Plus, he was turning out to be his own good luck charm.
The third, and most improbable, event occurred at the county fair. The bear somehow made his way into the stroller even though he wasn’t supposed to spend the day at the fair with us. So we let her hang on to him as we checked out the exhibits.
About an hour into our visit, we realized that the darn thing was gone. Again. We retraced our steps and checked the lost and found. When the bear wasn’t found we gave him up for lost and went on with our day. As we were leaving the “kiddie” section of the fair, we saw a familiar fuzzy figure carefully seated at the base of some scaffolding. Holy cow, are you kidding me? How does this bear keep reappearing? He is one lucky bear.
Keeping in mind that this bear’s luck may not always hold, I now have a spare bear that I found on EBay.
But as long as he’s still around, I think we should take him to the casino as a good luck charm. This bear is gonna make us rich!
On a side note, this bear needs a name. We just call him “Bear” but I think he needs something more befitting to his luckiness, don’t you?