Of Magic and Mooses

The other day I noticed this all over the back of the Baby's door:

Me: [Baby], who did this?

Baby: It wasn't me. It was Audrey the Moose.

Me: [Baby], you know that you shouldn't draw on the walls or the door, right?

Baby: (whispering) Bad Audrey the Moose.

Ahhhh! I had some hope that a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser might work its magic on the moose scribble, but I didn't expect that it would be so easy:

I just dampened the Magic Eraser and rubbed off the crayon. Good as new. I have to give credit to a former teenaged babysitter who watched the Girl and the Boy before the Baby (or Audrey the Moose, coincidentally, I'm sure) existed for telling me about Magic Eraser. I guess that the sitter grew up in a home where parents imparted practical advice to children about proper cleaning techniques and how to balance a checkbook and change a tire. Growing up in my house you learned about antiquing, making gravestone rubbings, and the NATO phonetic alphabet. I had a liberal arts kind of upbringing. I'm not saying that one is better, just different.

No one was more relieved than the Baby that the Magic Eraser lived up to its name:

The day after the scribbling incident, I received this in the mail:

I love One Kings Lane and I was supa, dupa excited (as the Baby would say) about what was in the box. Here she is, everyone!

Y'all, it's Audrey the Moose! Well, technically it's a chindi wrapped moose, multi colored, but we all know who it really is. She's a little more whimsical than my usual taste, but she is so perfectly Audrey that I had to have her. She is supposedly Christmas decor, but I don't think that the chindi is really holiday or seasonally specific.

It's funny that the Baby chose a moose to be her imaginary friend/object of blame. The summer that I was pregnant with the Baby we went to Maine for a couple of weeks and I was meeting up with Sister to go for a walk. I was walking down the dirt road (the same one where I had my first driving/crashing lesson) and as I came upon a clearing I saw the ugliest horse ever. You know in Cinderella, her old horse? He looks like this?

 
That's sort of what this horse looked like, only even uglier. Then after a minute I realized that it wasn't a horse at all, it was a moose! It sized me up and kind of shrugged and ambled off through the woods from whence it came. Whenever I tell this story, I tell the Baby that she and I saw the moose, only she was in my belly. When she tells the story, it's like she was really there.

Anyhow, we're happy to have a tangible and decorative moose join the family. It was certainly easier to obtain the moose than it would have been to build on extra rooms for all of the imaginary brothers that the Boy had when he was the Baby's age. Even Abe (aka Blade, according to the Baby) got into the act:

Love it! Happy weekend!