Gaaron has a stuffed elephant, specifically Lumpy from Pooh's Heffalump Movie, and it's the only one that been on his bed consistantly since he was 6 months old. He doesn't carry it around (that's reserved for far cooler toys, like Spiderman or PowerRanger action figures), but he won't object to me tucking it next to him at night. On the whole, Gaaron's pretty fearless, except for one thing: we have some fake butterflies on a plant in our bathroom, and if you pick one up and move towards him in anyway, he will shriek. When Dana was that young, her fear was plastic frogs. And she did go through the afraid of the dark phase, and it's only been within the last year or so that she's moved away from it. For about two years she was sleeping with the lights on all night. Drove me nuts.

That's kind of funny about the Goddess. We're not a particularly religious family and only go to church on holidays with my hubby's parents, so the kids haven't had much exposure to religion. So the only explanation for the following is that Dana is hearing other kids at school talk about it. At Christmas, when we drive by Nativity scenes, she yells, "Look! It's baby God!" Then just a couple months ago, she asked me, "When did God die?" We talk about such misconceptions, though I'm really curious where she got that notion that God is dead--I was unaware I was raising a nihilist.