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I. It's no secret that James has needed his "lovies" with a desperate intensity ever since he was little. First it was Steven Bear, and then George. There was a binky in there for a while too, and Thomas the train and Lightning McQueen have been necessities as well from time to time. We bought Owen his own Curious George just to keep him from grabbing James' all the time. I'm not sure that either of us thought he would get attached to it. But Owen loves "Dee" (from back when he couldn't pronounce "George") and he's been his unquestioned favorite bedtime friend. Still, even though he goes most places with Owen, it's never a big deal for Dee to be left home when we go out for groceries or to stay upstairs in bed for an entire morning. James would not have been able to handle these things, but Owen is just sort of less intense about everything than his older brother.

We couldn't find Dee last week. The first night, Owen took it in stride. He asked for him when it was time for bed. I told him that I couldn't find him anywhere in his room or in his bed, that I would look for him downstairs and bring him up if I found him. This was fine by Owen, and he went to bed without complaining. I looked through the downstairs and didn't find anything. The next day I don't think I thought about Dee again until bedtime. Owen asked for him again, and I said that I still hadn't found him, but this time I would really look hard.

I scoured the van, the closets, and looked under all the furniture. I went down to the basement and looked in the toy shopping cart that Owen likes to push him around in. I looked in the laundry baskets and behind books on the bookshelves. Neither J or I could find anything.

The next day we searched for real. I walked over to the neighboring playground and looked under the slides where the boys make "forts." When I was out running errands I stopped at the Wegmans' lost and found and asked if any stuffed animals had showed up. I made a note to call the other Wegmans that we'd been to that week and scratched my head in frustration. But Owen was nonplussed by it all. He didn't bring Dee up and didn't seem to miss him. He didn't even ask for him at bedtime that night.

The next day was an effort to find Dee, but really it was the long-delayed project of cleaning their room. "He has to be in here" we told each other. You couldn't see their floor for the mess, and we were sure he would turn up, and even bribed Owen into helping with the promise of looking for Dee while we did.

Nothing. The room looked great when we were done, and Owen asked at the end if any of us had seen Dee, but he didn't seem upset at all that we hadn't. He slept without him for another night without being bothered by it, and then the next day J got a message from our Kylie. It was Abby, and she was holding up a dirty monkey in a yellow shirt asking "Is this Owen's?" She quickly showed it to me, and then we called Owen over. I was expecting the same indifferent reaction. He saw his George and burst into tears.

It was a good night when J came back with him and we laid him in the arms of a sleeping Owen.

II.

James and Owen watched a bit of Fantasia the other day, the old/original one. They were both completely gassed out from having slept (but really, not slept) in the tent (in the living room) the night before. There was an hour left till bedtime, and we treated them to a couple scenes from a movie. I skipped the opening Toccata and Fugue sequence, and they watched a couple of the dances from Nutcracker. They didn't seem particularly interested, but were pleasantly spaced out on the couch. Then I remembered about the Rite of Spring animation.
"Do you guys want to see some dinosaurs?"
"Oh, yes!"
"I WUV dinosaurs!"
I skipped ahead. After a lot of initial complaining about "Where are the dinosaurs?"--there is a long opening sequence depicting the earth being formed--they started to get hooked, and when the dinosaurs came out they were both completely wide eyed. I had forgotten both how violent that cartoon is, and how explicitly it tells the story of evolution through chance and random cosmic upheaval. I wondered if any of it would stick to the next day.

It did. Owen woke up talking about how the dinosaurs could hear something. He'd then pretend to listen, and declare "It's a DINOSAURUS WEX!" And he'd run around shrieking and pretending to fight. James, on the other hand, declared that he was going to make a book of the movie. And he did. He drew scene by scene pictures of galaxies forming, nebulous clouds of gas becoming planets, comets flashing through space, violent eruptions of lava from the earth's volcanoes, amoeba-like creatures floating in the water, primitive undersea life, and then the entire dinosaur sequence. He stopped at one point and in near-panic declared "OH NO! I forgot about the part with the pterodactyls!" He even made the bit with the dinosaurs turning into skeletons at the end.

Oh, and they must have watched a little bit of the Beethoven Six sequence with Zeus, because he also made himself a bunch of paper lightning bolts that he was using to smite Owen.