#20: Please please please let me find Little Larry

Full disclosure: My son Will started nursery school this week and I just dropped him off for his first full day. He was howling and screaming when I left, and everything at the moment is filtered through howling-colored glasses.

On the way there, we seem to have lost Little Larry, who was riding shotgun -- undergun?-- in the basket beneath Will's stroller.

Little Larry is one of a tribe of Larrys. Originally there was just Big Larry, a lamb baby blanket with soft satin paws that Will picked apart over time into cloudy pom poms of thread. He was a shower gift from friends and at one point in his life was actually white and not grey.

Big Larry was at first just Larry, named for my husbands now-late uncle Larry, who wouldn't eat lamb. Ha ha. Larry was eventually lost at the zoo where I like to picture him in the soft grass gazing happily at the clouds and not, say, frolicking with the baboons.

At that point there was a second Larry already, dubbed Larry Feingold, Certified Public Lamb, by my cousin. We ordered a third, and so we had two again. New Big Larry and Larry Feingold.

But the Larrys kept growing. The same friends who gave us OL (Original Larry) also gave us a tiny white Gund bear like the one my friend C had growing up. His was Mohatma Gundhi; we named ours Indira. By the time Will could talk, he let us know that clearly this was a case of mistaken identity. That bear was little Larry; the big teddy bear was Larry Bear; the little brown Gund (plucked from the Salvation Army when we were first talking about having a child and subsequently washed and washed and washed) was basketball coach Larry Brown.

So it's Little Larry, nee Indira, who seems to have made a run for it. I hope to find him in the nieghborhood or through the parents web group. I also hope to get through this morning without a big shot of whiskey.

As a parent you can control two things and two things only -- how much love you put into your children and keeping track of all their crap. In the face of howling-colored glasses and the sense that by God my baby is out in the world now, I'm trying to keep from hyperventilating over the few things that seem controllable.

For a very eloquent take on kids and their bears, go here: RIP, Minty Bear