The Tale of Five Blankeys

I was cleaning in Bee's room today to prepare for my BIL's visit from this afternoon 'til tomorrow morning. I was folding baby blankets and putting them in a stack in the amoire when it suddenly dawned on me that I was folding BABY blankets in a FIVE-year-old's room. When I think about it, I can remember thinking this before, but decided to leave them out and not store them away with the reasoning that Bee uses them for her baby dolls. I realized today that while, yes, she does use them for her baby dolls, I've been using that as a reason not to put all of my littlest one's baby things away. It's a way of not storing her babyhood away just yet. When I look around, those blankets are really the last remaining proof that there was once a baby girl in our lives. Her pants no longer have snaps in the crotch. Her shirts no longer have snaps in the neck. Her jammies no longer have feet in them. She only uses a sippie cup during the night. There's no longer the always present box of wipies. The diaper bag at the front door has long since been packed away. We haven't had a high chair or booster seat for a long time. The tube of flouride-free toothpaste was retired about 3 years ago, and I switched her to the big-kid shampoo from baby-shampoo about 3 years ago. Where exactly did my baby-girl go so quickly?

She's growing up so incredibly fast. It seems like just yesterday all those blankets came into my life. I remember buying or recieving each of them. The one in the top left corner is a circus toille material designed by Amy Coe from when Target first began carrying her stuff in their baby department. That blanket screamed "precious baby-girl" to me in a world that had been entirely Thomas the Tank Engine and Dinosaurs until she came along. I just had to have it. The pink one with the cherries on it is from my mom. We discovered that Bee loves super soft things, so mom went out and found that super soft blanket and bought it for her. It also happens to be an Amy Coe design. The green one next to it was bought by Mountain Mom for the exact same reason. The patchwork blanket above it was made by a co-worker of Mountain Mom's, and although I never personally met her, it meant so much to Mountain Mom to give it to me. The flowered blanket on the right is the Gymboree blanket that Sara Orange sent to her before she was ever even born, because all the little people in our house before her had a special Gymboree blankey too. Our earliest pics are of Bee wrapped in that special Sara Orange blankey while she's still in the hospital. They all carry memories...of the special people that gave them to her (and me) and of my baby-girl snuggled and warm in them. They may always be in her room somewhere. I may never pack them away, who knows!

I do know that for now they aren't going anywhere other than stacked on the second shelf of her armoire waiting for playtime tomorrow when they will once again protect a baby doll from the harsh elements outside, or cover the entire bedroom floor for a teddy-bear's picnic, or be draped across the back of two chairs to form a tent.

Goodnight everyone!