Little baby, big baby

9/13/13 Note: This was a post that I had written around Easter time that got lost in the recesses of the Draft section.




The Easter Bunny was good to Collin this year, in that he brought him his first excuse to PIMP  the jacket that makes him look like my grandpa Morton from The Old Country. In a good way.
It was the first piece of clothing, amongst a pile of "First  Clothing", that we got at a yard sale on a Saturday morning when we first found out we were pregnant. I had just finished working a night shift, and we had no intentions of garage sale shopping, but there it was on the side of the road. We suddenly found ourselves descending upon it like a Lion on the slow buffalo at the watering hole. Without saying, we both knew exactly what we were looking for: baby stuff. Any kind of baby stuff. And boy, did we find it (those people had twins!).
We had no idea what the sex of the baby was (which was irrelevent,  because we never ended up finding out for the whole duration of the pregnancy), but we knew that that child of ours, girl or boy, was going to own that jacket. And then we looked at each other and we suddenly knew, for the first time, that we were going to be parents. Real parents. But most of all, we knew we were going to love it, and we were going to have an awesome kid, a kid we were going to be proud of and find joy in.
I think it was then that I hit a new phase of my life. Motherhood. The shock of the positive pregnancy test wore off, and I was plunged into new waters, a place I had been yearning for for so long. Suddenly, nothing was more  important to me than that little life I was chosen to bear, to sustain, to nurture. I made it my life's work.
But back to the Easter Bunny, who was also good to Collin in that he brought Collin his alligator family. The alligator family started out as one rubbery lizard, followed by a package of cheap, plastic lizards, that became babies. So the big lizard became the daddy. Oh, and they're all alligators. Or, "Ayegaygahs."
I'm always finding Papa "Ayegaygah" lounging around in the weirdest positions, so of course I've developed the odd habit of photographing him.
I don't know why.

Update 9/13/13: Daddy Ayegaygah is now just Daddy Lizard. The original Daddy Lizard disappeared one day, and Collin never stopped searching for him. For a while, we were reading The Velveteen Rabbit, and I tried to use the Nursery Fairy idea from the story. "Oh, perhaps the Nursery Fairy has taken Daddy Lizard to the redwoods to be a Real lizard, just like the Velveteen Rabbit." Collin would just look at me blankly. Not buying it, mom.

Thankfully, we happened to find a brand new Daddy Lizard at Rite Aid. Collin was SO excited to "Find" him. But what's with that extra white paint on his mouth? Daddy Lizard didn't have that before he got lost. Must have been eating too much vanilla ice cream at Rite Aid.