Blue Dog – The Tail of a Boy’s Best Friend

Puzzle Momma

10 years ago

At my baby shower for my firstborn son, Derek, I received a very cute stuffed blue dog as a gift. I cannot even recall at this point who it was that gave it to us, but ironically, I had given the same dog to a girlfriend of mine a few weeks earlier for her first baby shower.

I began showing Derek the dog and laying it beside him as we played on the floor very early on, and it wasn’t long before he was playing with the dog a lot. We gave him the name Blue Dog (I know, very original! LOL) some time later on when Derek was old enough to associate a person or thing with a name.

He became attached to Blue Dog very quickly, and it wasn’t long before Blue Dog was offered a coveted spot in Derek’s crib. He began to sleep with him nightly, and it wasn’t long before he started coming downstairs with Derek in the morning as well.

It was always a challenge every night before bed to find Blue Dog because we knew that Derek wouldn’t sleep if he didn’t have his loyal companion by his side. However, we never knew where we would find the little mischievous dog – behind a piece of furniture, in an empty box, or even the garbage can. And there was many a night when we searched the house to the point of exhaustion and still couldn’t find him. Luckily those nights didn’t happen too often, until we went to CA for 8 weeks and lived in a hotel room….

Of course one of the first things we packed for Derek for this extended stay in a southern CA hotel was his favorite companion. He kept the dog by his side daily, until one day near the end of our stay, we could not find him – anywhere! Of course, the first night was difficult without his best friend, but we were confident that by the next day we would locate him in some crazy place like the closet or the bathroom garbage can, or even behind the beds in the secondary room he was sleeping in at the hotel. But alas, we could not find him. After a couple of days we asked the staff at the front desk of the hotel to keep an eye out for him, in case he mysteriously showed up outside of our room and was taken to the hotel’s lost and found. A few days later we were told that a member of the carpet cleaning company that was on site that week remembered seeing a little blue stuffed animal near the elevators. YAY! But then we were also told that the person said they left the animal there thinking someone might come for it later….BOO! We never found Blue Dog, and a week or so later we returned home to FL – sad and dog less.

As soon as we returned home, I began to search the internet for another dog just like Blue Dog so that we could “surprise” Derek with the return of his beloved pet. Unfortunately, the dog appeared to be out of stock and no longer in production. I even went as far as to call my friend whom I had given the same dog to a couple of weeks before I got Derek’s, but she said she didn’t know where her son’s dog was either. So, as a court of last resort, I scanned ebay, and low and behold – I found the exact same dog with one small modification – the price tag! This “gently used” version looked to be in great shape, but was over twice the amount that I knew this dog had cost new, but what was I, as the mother of a very distraught toddler, to do? I did what most other mom’s would do in the same situation – I sighed heavily, and clicked on the “buy it now” button. 🙂

I have to say that the dog arrived in great shape, though getting him in the mail was a bit of a fiasco as we were in the process of moving at the time, and the dog got sent to several places before FINALLY making it into our hands. However, the look on Derek’s face when we handed him his Blue Dog was well worth the outrageous price we spent to get Blue Dog’s twin brother.

Since that time, over two years ago, we have lost and found, lost and found, that #*($&!! dog more times than I can count. Sometimes it has been hours or days, and once, more than a week before the little buggar was found (in Randy’s and my bathroom linen closet of all places!), but when we do know his whereabouts, it’s always on top of Derek’s big boy bed where he waits patiently for his best friend to return each night. Blue Dog is getting rather dirty and scraggly looking, and he’s lost a lot of his fluffiness, but that’s okay with us. We have never told him that this is a different dog, and to this day he still doesn’t know that it’s not his original companion. We figure some day when he asks, or reads this blog post, he’ll know, but until then we can just be happy in the knowledge that we made our little boy very, very happy. 🙂