Trauma!

So when I picked Little Raven up from the daycare on Monday, she calming asked if we could drive up to another daycare in the other end of town.

Mama: "Why do you need to go there? You were there all day with the daycare, weren't you"
LR "You know that sweater that Stephen bought me, from Medicine Hat? when we were at the beach party, I took it off, and left it there."

So we drive up to the other daycare, and she looks in the lost and found, and she looks in the gym, and there is no pink Medicine Hat Tigers sweater to be found anywhere. And the tears begin.

She was so upset that she had lost this one sweater, which was a HUGE surprise, because this child will be an only child until her Dad's & my baby is born next month, (and she will still be her Mom's only child), and is an only grandchild to two sets of Grandparents, and was an only grandchild to the third set of grandparents until about a year and a half ago. She'll be eleven in the spring. In short, she's spoiled rotten.

Gifts come out of the woodwork, whether there is an occasion or not. And she knows that by the time her Christmas toys are boring, it will be her birthday anyway. We've tried cutting back on the "things" that she receives, but it was never effective.

We've tried teaching her responsibility, but that has never sunk in either. She has always known 'if I loose it / break it etc., someone will replace it.'

Maybe it's because we only see Stephen once a year, maybe because this sweater was from the west, and therefore we can't purchase one here, or maybe it's because she doesn't receive gifts from Stephen the way she receives things from other people, but this one darn sweater meant a lot to her.

She was also afraid to tell Stephen that she'd lost his gift to her, but she was trying to figure out how she was going to tell him. So she wasn't planning on not saying anything to him, and she didn't try to tell us that it had been stolen or anything else, she admitted what had happened. usually if she looses something, we tell her that we're disappointed, we may take away privileges, etc. for discipline. In this case, there was no need, she punished herself more than enough.

So, while I wanted to find the sweater, it WAS a good time to hope that SOME responsibility would sink in. So I did what I could to help her, but made it her job to do the work. She called the other daycare on Tuesday, and they still hadn't seen it. On Wednesday, they called back, and said that all the lost and found from the beach party had been sent to a third daycare. So she called there.

She was lucky, the third daycare had it!!

So we picked up her very pink Medicine Hat Tigers sweatshirt yesterday. She was so happy to see it that she hugged it, and then managed, in the car, to put it on over top of the sweatshirt she was already wearing, without removing her seat belt and with removing her jacket.

So Uncle Stevie, it looks like she really appreciated this Christmas gift!!