Lily's stuffed cat, Trumpkin, is a legitimate member of our family. Lily plays with Trumpkin all day, every day. We find Trumpkin all over the house in all kinds of hidey-holes, wearing doll clothes, "eating" out of play dishes, wrapped up in blankets, riding in toy cars. Lily sleeps with Trumpkin every night, and they are, basically, inseparable.
I need you to understand that Trumpkin is a very important part of our daily lives.
Near the end of March...Trumpkin went missing. We looked in all the usual suspect places. We retraced steps. We moved furniture. We looked in trash cans (just in case Brynna had accidentally "helped"). We checked all around our outside areas (even though she's not supposed to take Trumpkin outside). Brad, Barbara, and I all took turns scouring our vehicles. Barbara and I each went through every toy bin several times each. We stripped beds, went through laundry bins, checked kitchen cabinets. My mom had returned to Alabama roughly the day before we realized we couldn't find Trumpkin, so we asked her to please search her luggage, just in case Lily had tucked the cat into a random suitcase corner. Mom searched twice and came up empty.
To take our search even further, Brad and I started going through our photos from the previous weeks, scouring to find traces of Trumpkin so that we could try to date the last time/place that we knew where she was. This was the winning photo:
Can you spot her? She's under Lily's elbow.
Yeah. That's how crazy we got during the searching process. Incidentally, this photo's time stamp confirmed that Trumpkin was here the day AFTER my mom left.
But y'all: we could NOT find Trumpkin anywhere and were despairing that she'd somehow gone out with the trash. It was bad. I cried over that stuffed cat on several occasions. Lily was sad every night at bedtime (although, during the day, she was perfectly chipper, which I figured out was because she had full confidence that we would pull through for her and find her kitty). Early in this pregnancy, while I was so sick and in the bed, Lily would frequently bring Trumpkin to me and leave her on Brad's pillow to "keep me company," which was just about the most selfless thing Lily could have done. It was breaking my heart that we couldn't find her.
So, we spent time praying for Trumpkin's recovery, tirelessly searching in all the places we had already searched, and...ordering a similar (but not quite the same) cat that could potentially act as a stand-in. For the record: we have a LOT of stuffed cats. But, according to Lily, none of their backs were the right size (length). That was very important to her.
But then. A birthday miracle.
At some point on Lily's birthday, Brynna pulled out most of the toys in one of the cabinets (I assume she was looking for something very specific, which required taking out most every item). She sat playing very happily on the floor, and I snapped this picture of her making a pretty tall stack of blocks all my herself:
Look how well she stacked those blocks! Also...can you spy Trumpkin?
Here's a closer shot of her stack of blocks.
Also a closer shot of Trumpkin. See her?
While Brynn was playing, Lily got up and walked over (which made me nervous that she was going to mess with Brynn's tower; that's kind of how their relationship runs currently), squatted down for a minute, then popped up and announced, "It's Trumpkin!"
If she hadn't held the cat up and waved her around for all of us to see, I would not have believed her. Barbara and I had both gone through that cabinet a few times. But lo and behold:
Trumpkin was there! In the fur! And Brynn had been sitting next to her for quite a while...can't understand why she didn't put me out of my misery with the good news earlier, but 23-month-olds can't always be trusted.
We had to get Lily to explain how/where she spotted her. How in heaven's name had we overlooked her so many times??
From what we could decipher, Trumpkin was inside this Calico Critters house, which I think was inside another (obviously larger) Calico Critters house.
After three weeks of tearing the house apart, it was nearly impossible to believe that she'd been in there the whole time. So impossible, in fact, that I've developed a much more plausible theory:
Trumpkin decided she needed a sabbatical.
That cabinet is a gateway to Narnia.
Trumpkin has now met Aslan and will never be the same.
I believe this look confirms my theory.
(But in all seriousness: I was so incredibly grateful for her return and offered up actual prayers of thanks to the Lord. Many thanks to any of you who also knew of our dilemma and joined us in prayer.)
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