Remember a few months ago when I wrote about Bah? He is Payton’s stuff puppy. We ended up having a situation that I feared back when I wrote about him in October. Here is what I said back then…
I had to be the bad guy the next day though. I told Lindsey that we should not take Bah to daycare. We are just creating more problems.
Payton was at daycare on Tuesday. I arrived after work and saw that they were outside playing. I went upstairs to get her lunchbox. I noticed that in her cubby, there was also a bag full of her Lion Guard figures. My guess was that she brought those instead of Bah. I picked her up outside and we went home.
Everything was normal at home, until about 7:30 p.m. It was getting a little late and Lindsey looked at me and said “did you get B-A-H?” Umm, no, did she take him to daycare? Lindsey said that yes, she had him when she went in and she had her Lion Guard toys.
Maybe this would be the moment where she was done with him. We knew bedtime could be interesting. We got a bath and put her to bed and everything seemed fine. I brought the monitor downstairs to watch her.
At first she was playing with her Lion Guard figures (she really loves them) and it looked like we dodged a bullet. Then she started to get tired. She started to look around her crib (it is almost completely dark in her room) and feeling around for Bah. She kept looking under the pillow and blankets. You could see a sense of panic in her. She started to whimper. Then the whimpering turned to sobs which then turned into screams.
I ran up and found the backup we have. Unfortunately, it looks completely different now because of how worn Bah is. I took it into her room and said here he is and she immediately yelled “no, this is Logan’s Bah!” and threw it out of her crib. She continued crying.
I tried to comfort her by telling her that Bah was at daycare and we would get him in the morning. She cried harder. I asked her if she wanted to come downstairs and watch TV for a bit (I was hoping she might just pass out). She came down, but as we got towards the bottom of the steps, she slipped and fell. She smacked her face pretty hard and ended up with a black eye.
I took her back up to her room after a bit and tried to get her to lay down with me on her floor pillow thing. She did that for a bit, but then kept getting up and being silly. So we decided to try and sleep in our bed. It was like 10:30 and I had to be up at 4:30, so it was time for bed. She would lay there for a few minutes, but then she wanted to get up and see Samson. Or go see Logan. Whenever she started to get tired, she would instinctively put her thumb near her mouth, then remember Bah, and start crying; which would give her a burst of energy. Great cycle.
I decided to be the bad guy and just put her back in the crib and hope she just fell asleep. It did not work. She just screamed. We tried bringing her back to our bed, but that did not work either, she just wanted to climb out of bed and run around. Eventually it was 12:30 and enough was enough. We took her back to her room and Lindsey found her old puppy from when she was a kid. Payton took it and let it be a replacement. She still cried for a bit, but I think she was sleep by 1:00.
At that point, Logan woke up and started crying for a bottle. Needless to say, I was pretty tired at work on Wednesday. Anyways, Lindsey’s sister went to get Bah from the daycare and she gave it to Lindsey’s mom who drove it up to Payton in the morning. Payton was very excited and barely put him down the rest of the day.
The funny thing is that at one point, Payton told us that she got paint on Bah and they (the daycare people) put him in the washer. Payton makes up stories, so it was hard to tell if that was the truth. Anyways, it turns out in this case she was telling the truth.
It was like the perfect storm of events. I did not know she took him, he was not in the cubby because he was in the dryer, the ladies were not inside to inform me that he was in the dryer, and since Payton was outside, she did not think about him when we went home.
All of that does not make me feel any less horrible. Watching her cry broke my heart and made me cry as well.
Welcome to Parenthood. This sounds normal.