Pinkie

Pinkie was missing. No not a finger. Rather, Olivia’s pink poodle. It is a stuffed animal, a birthday gift from Ms. Carolyn and Mr. Mike. Olivia loves Pinkie and during Christmas she (Pinkie not Olivia) went missing. We looked everywhere for her… several times. She went missing about the same time that we had carpet put in the bedrooms of our house. In order to have the carpet installed we had to move everything out of the rooms. So I took that opportunity to put a bunch of toys (those little small toys that children seem to accumulate from everywhere – birthday parties, fast food joints, school, gumball machines, parking garage floors…) in a bag and hide it in our closet for disposal at a later time. The idea was that if neither kid asked about anything in the bag then I could easily get rid of these extra toys. The problem was that I did not have time to really separate the good stuff form the junk so it all went into the same bag. Then Olivia asked –Where’s Pinkie? We looked all over the house and couldn’t find her so I assumed Pinkie as in the bag. The question arose during the pre Christmas week and I did not have time to search through the bag so I just told Olivia that she would show up eventually. With confidence I finally looked into the bag….No Pinkie. For several days I would look in the bag again – not wanting to dump the contents out because the noise of toys dropping out of a bag would send my children running from all points of the house to my room. So I would take the bag out, rummage through and then decide it was not in there and tell Olivia that Pinkie would show up sometime. It was then that I started looking for lumps in the carpet. Surely the carpet guys would have noticed a pink dog and would not have installed the carpet over the dog but I could not find the dog so... I contemplated getting a replacement dog but when I went to Target they were all sold out. I was beginning to panic. Where could that dog be??? The house is only so big. Did Jack throw it out??? He does like the trash but normally he only throws trash like items in the trash. Perhaps Pinkie was very dirty and looked like trash. WHAT WERE WE GOING TO DO???? And then one blissful Sunday (blissful because it was Sunday which is always nice and blissful because it was bright and sunny out and unseasonably warm for January) Olivia came running out of her Sunday School room with Pinkie. She had brought her to church and we had forgotten about it. And then there was no Sunday School for a few weeks so Pinkie just sat there alone in the classroom – actually she was very dirty so either someone played with her or she escaped and played outside in the mud or perhaps she had spent some time in the trash pre Sunday school visit… So this past week I washed Pinkie and now she is back in our lives. Hopefully we will not lose her again. Perhaps I should make her dog tags just in case.