We just spent the last two weeks with a full nest once again. The Winey Daughter finished her first college semester and headed back to Northeast Ohio for break. The Winey Son was able to back to Ohio too – a blessed thing, because sometimes those Lieutenants aren’t able to make it home for the holidays. It was such a wonderful thing to have us all together again. Time for laughing and teasing and eating and for me, a bit of wistful reminiscing. It all started the other day, when I was upstairs in my daughter’s room sorting laundry and straightening up and I came across something wadded up on her bed: her baby blanket.
This blanket started out as a yellow rectangle of very soft woven cotton with teddy bear cut outs all over it. It was “given” to her by her then three year old brother, who was said blanket’s previous owner.
He gave her the blanket because even before she was born, he was determined that “his” baby have her own “little blanky”. His little blanky was white, covered in a satiny white material with a baby blue teddy bear in the middle of it. He adored little blanky (just plain old “blanky” for short) and was not about to accept a sibling without his or her own version.
At first they travelled tucked around little infant legs and into car seats and strollers. Then they were grabbed onto by baby hands and held next to fat little cheeks during thumb sucking sessions. They trekked to day care and visits to grandparents’ homes and on vacation. One of them actually had to be mailed back to us from a hotel where it was accidentally left behind upon departure. You should have heard my conversation with the hotel front desk on that call.
When our son was particularly stressed out, he would ask for “blanky ‘fier” (translation: blanky and pacifier). His little blanky stayed home when he got older and went on vacations and to college (yeah, they don’t actually encourage you to bring your little blanky to West Point).
But, my daughter’s blanky has become one of the most well travelled pieces of cloth in human history. It has been to France, England, Spain and Canada. It has visited ski resorts in many states, Disney World many times, major cities and little country towns. And it left the Winey Nest back in August to go to college with her.
Those two blankets are strikingly vivid memories of my children as babies and toddlers. I cannot help but become oh, just a tad reflective (because hysterical is sort of frowned on by the people I live with) when I see them.
If you look at them today, you might say, “Whoa, those are some ratty old blankets there.” But I see the little hands that used to clutch them and the little faces that were pressed into them. I see them wrapped around those little sleeping angels in their cribs and cuddled next to them in bed on the night before they started kindergarten. I see my son keeping that blanket on his bed well into his teen years and my daughter quietly tucking hers into her suitcase as she went to sleep at a friends’ house for the night. I see my son, about to enter West Point, leaving it on his bed the night before we left for his Plebe year and my daughter almost defiantly adding it to her suitcase as she packed for college.
They love(d) those ratty old blankets so very, very much. And that’s why I love those ratty old blankets even more.