Wile E. Grandpa

Zozo has a bedtime ritual that involves kissing most, if not all, the stuffed animals on the shelves over her desk.

(Yes, at the ripe old age of 19 months, she has a desk. Actually, she’s had it since before she was born, as it’s part of the bedroom set we chose for her…goes with the crib that converts to a toddler bed that converts to a full. We’re practical people, and wanted to go through the ordeal of finding/researching/selecting furniture only once.)

So, every night after she’s in her jammies, we go over to the shelves and she chooses the order in which she wants to kiss them goodnight. She mixes it up a bit, sometimes choosing Penny the Cat before Birthday Dog, but we always kiss Cardinal Bird on game days, and always always end with Hoot the Owl. Hoot was her daddy’s, a long time ago when we were in college and before Beanie Babies became a huge rage. We found him (and Chocolate Moose for me) in a bargain bin at Osco Drug in Columbia, Missouri. For unknown reasons, Zozo has taken a liking to Hoot the Owl and he is now hers, much to Daddy’s dismay.

Friday night, though, Zozo was intent on retrieving something from her top shelf. We went through all the animals up there, and some of them twice (“Hedgehog? No? Rainbow Bear? No? Share Bear? No? For the love of Pete, what do you want?!”) before we figured out that she was pointing to the small framed photo of her and Grandpa Ray taken at Christmas two years ago.

So we got it down, and she grasped it in her chubby little fingers, and planted a kiss right on Grandpa Ray’s face.

My heart melted.

I, of course, called Dad immediately after putting her down for the night. When he called back, I relayed the story to him, waiting to hear how thrilled he was that she had done that.

He laughed and said, “Oh, yeah. I taught her that the last time I babysat!”

Sneaky, sneaky Grandpa.