This past weekend I was completing one of my to-do items on my list, and figured the new year was as good an excuse as any to get it done!  I have a stack of home movies of my kids on VCR tapes that I have been meaning for years to get converted to DVDs before the tapes gum up and fall apart.  It’s not hard, I do it all the time, but it’s kinda like a plumber with leaky pipes… it always gets pushed to the bottom of the list. But I finally finished it.  It was a blast watching these videos of my kids as babies, and I must confess to tearing up more than once. The same weekend I was cleaning out the attic and making room for all the new junk that must go in the attic and I had more moments that caused me to pause.  There was something that I kept running across, in both the videos and in the attic.

Stuffed animals.  

All kinds of stuffed animals. I had forgotten about most of them, but all those memories came flooding back to me of having to buy them, wash them, repair them, hide them, find them, and wash them again. My boys loved those little stuffed animals that they dragged all over the yard, the house, and of course they couldn’t go to sleep without them. I guess when I was in the middle of the madness that is raising little children I never noticed just how many there were until I watched those videos. And how they all ended up in the attic stuffed into every nook and crannie I’ll never know.

The family pet

When I was a kid we had a pet dog named J.D.. As far back as I can remember he was there. I guess I never knew any different growing up that we had a dog, and just about all my friends had family dogs too. But when it came to my own house full of kids, for years I refused to get a dog. It was going to be too much hassle, too much money, too much poop. So for years I refused even though our kids begged for a dog. When we finally gave in we realized just how much our kids wanted to love something like that and how important it was for them.

Even with my own past of having a family pet it just escaped me how important it is to have one. Had I realized it sooner, my kids would have had one sooner.  Sorry guys.  I have come to realize that kids need things to love. That’s why they desire those little stuffed animals and nurture them like they do. And the next natural extension of that is the family pet. We have 2 dogs now, each with their own personality, good sides, and bad sides. They are truly another family member and our kids look at them just like that.

I look at those stuffed animals a little differently now. They taught my kids how to love and take care of something that needs taking care of.  Now, if I could just get the kids to take the dogs out more often, everything would be just about perfect.