Medic!

Every fall, the store my wife manages gets in their holiday merchandise. Being a farm supply type place, they get more interesting things than one would expect. Candles, home decor, toys, all sorts of the things we use to fill our homes.  This includes stuffed animals of all sizes.  ALL sizes.  Usually there are cows and lambs and horses that are about 3 feet long and just plain big. 

I can only assume these plush beasts are meant for kids.  They aren’t stocked with the pet toys, and they only come around this time of year. I would say I don’t understand why a kid would need a snuggly toy cow that is bigger than they are, but then I think back to the stuffed animal collection I had as a child. A ridiculous amount of fuzzy, fluffy, and well loved bears, dogs, rabbits, ewoks, Grover, even Lurky from Rainbow Brite. 

(Note:  This all came crashing down upon my 11-year-old shoulders when my allergist told me that I couldn’t have any of them in my room due to dust mites. None. Not one. No carpet either, but what child of 11 cares about carpet?  My Garfield collection had to go in a glass bookcase, like some sort of prison for sarcastic orange cartoon cats.  But I digress.)

You may know that we have animals. Spoiled animals. Every year, Tank, the 90 pound lab/coonhound mix, gets one of the big plush farm animals. First a cow, another cow, then a lamb. These things are roughly the same size he is, so he carries them around the house, unable to see where he is going and generally tripping over them. Once he has it positioned in whatever room we are in, he proceeds to lick it profusely, then…suck on it like a pacifier. There’s no pretty way to say that. But he loves it. So we have a big slimy speed bump wherever we want to walk.  Eventually, a hole forms somewhere along a seam, and stuffing pours out until we deem the poor being deflated enough, and I sew it shut with some of my knitting yarn.  

This year…this year, we moved. Into a tiny duplex for the time being. And Tank has adjusted marvelously.  The limp lamb came along for the move.  But stuffed animal season came.  And what came home this year was a…bear?  A puppy?  It’s sort of both, I can’t tell. I call her Vivian because I got sick of saying “get your bear…puppy…whatever thing!”  And you guys, Vivian is…enormous. She’s easily 50% bigger than either cow or lamb were. She’s so big that even if she DID fit through the doors, Tank couldn’t carry her without clearing every surface within 4 feet of the floor.  So each night, one of us picks up a slimy Vivian and carries her from the living room, through the kitchen, into the bedroom, only to do the reverse in the morning, with Tank trying to help by dragging her down to the floor every other step.  The only way to avoid that is to carry her over our heads like a disgusting Macy’s parade balloon. 

Over the weekend, Tank performed an occipital lobotomy on Vivian.  Stuffing has been pouring out of a nine inch gash at the base of her skull. In the living room. Trailing through the kitchen. In our bedroom. Now, normal pet toys have big chunks of stuffing, he can pull it out in pieces the size of a softball or bigger. Vivian?  Oh no, Vivian has her own mysterious ways. Her stuffing is the size of cotton balls.  These things are everywhere.  I don’t watch Star Trek, but I know a Tribble infestation when I see one. 

So tonight, I yanked a bunch more of Viv’s brain matter and spinal column out, then placed some sutures. Tank was so traumatized by my stitching that he had to hide in the bedroom during the procedure. Vivian pulled through, but she’ll have a rather ugly and colorful scar.  Tonight, I’m the crazy lady who performs brain surgery on giant, slimy, stuffed…whatevers.