Don’t Get Stuck In Your Own Nightmare
These little guys are the Whimzies. Well, actually they’re the travel version of our Whimzies. See, Whimzies are little stuff animals about the size of a saltshaker. At our home, we have a collection of about twenty. My eight-year-old daughter has made a little booklet with a drawing and names for each of them. Every few days or so, one of us will hide these little critters all over the family room, and the other will have to hunt them out. The only rule is – just like with Easter Eggs – they have to be hidden in plain sight.
In the past, we’ve taken the Whimzies on the road with us. They’re fun to hide in hotel rooms or my mom’s house. On one visit to my mom’s, we forgot to bring them. So, instead, my kid made her own set of eight paper Whimzies to keep at her grandmother’s house. She even made a blue hot tub for them to hang out in when we weren’t there. Apparently, Whimzies are impervious to pruning.
Today, we played a few games of Whimzies at my mom’s house. During the last round, my daughter hid the little guys. We found all but one – an orange cat. I walked and crawled all over my mom’s living room, checking ever picture frame, stack of books, cushion, holiday decoration, nook, and cranny. Even my daughter couldn’t remember where she hid it. Eventually, we gave up. It was time to go.
I kept thinking in those last few minutes prior to departure that I’d spy the lost kitty. On the desk? By the chair? In the magazine rack? Nope, nope, and nope.
“This is like a nightmare I can’t wake up from,” my daughter said.
The whole experience wasn’t a total loss. It gave my daughter the idea for a chapter book called Don’t Get Stuck In Your Own Nightmare.
She started writing it on the drive home. Periodically, I inquired about the Whimzies.
“Where do the Whimzies come from?” I asked. “What’s their back story?”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” she said.
This surprised me. After all, this was a girl who had dozens of stuff animal friends, each with a name, personality, and history. But the Whimzies, for whatever reason, were just stuffed animals. Once she got to thinking about it, however, she explained that the Whimzies come from a magical land, where they spend a lot of time hiding from each other. She said that one of the Whimzies at our home, a gold and white cat named Cristy Tuna, once had “…a great great great great great great grandfather who wanted to help a human but started to vanish and then disappeared and never came back.” So, that’s why the Whimzies hide from us.
Eventually, my daughter finished the first chapter of her new book. The opening just blew me away:
“My name is Jack Rome. Nightmares come and go, but what if you could not get out? I live in Ohio. My family is a pretty busy one. My little sister sells lemonade, my twin cousins, Lou and Sue, go to their candy fan club, my dad works at Wal Mart, my Grandma is always making fancy dinner recipes, my mom does stuff with her friends, and I run a babysitting service. There is a kid who comes a lot named Alice who I adore. Alice has short, blond hair, a red headband, pale skin, black thin glasses, and eyes that are the same color as blueberries.”
Wow. I adored the rich, concrete description of this Alice character. I loved the blueberry eyes. Her writing made me wonder if there wasn’t a hidden benefit to all this searching that we do. Maybe losing a Whimzy wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe sometimes we need to lose something to force us to start paying attention to all the details.
