ERNIE

Well, we had a rough few days in our house this past week. Something dramatic happened-at least in our little ones eyes! We officially lost Micah's best friend, Ernie the elephant. For those of you with children, you know how important that ONE item is that your child adores and pretty much has by his/her side ALL day long and just can't live without! Well, that's Ernie for Micah.

On Tuesday we decided to go to the mall for a little bit to eat lunch and do some shopping. It was a great day...until the dramatic event happened.

We ended our trip by heading into a huge store called Carrefour (it is like a Super Walmart). Micah was overly tired by now, so I pulled Ernie out to comfort him. Micah sat in the cart for most of the time, but then wanted to get out and walk. At this point, I attempted to take Ernie away from him as he ran around, but he insisted on holding him. We headed from one side of the store to the other, and that was the last time we remember seeing Ernie. Once we got to the other side of the store, we began looking at toys, and Ernie was forgotten about. We must have looked at toys for 20 minutes or so, and then were ready to checkout. That was when I noticed that Ernie wasn't in Micah's diaper bag, hands, or our cart. I asked Micah where Ernie was (like he really had a clue), but thankfully he was too enthralled by the millions of toys around him to care at that point.

We knew this could be bad, so Paul and I began to frantically look around the store, retrace our steps a hundred times, ask customer service, and even had security ask around on their walkie-talkies. I tried explaining (in Arabic) to the customer service lady that my little boy had lost HIS favorite blue elephant in their store somewhere, but I must not have said everything correctly, as she just told me to go look in their toy section. She was extremely RUDE and acted like she didn't care that my precious boy had lost his FAVORITE toy in the whole world. She really made me mad, was no help at all, and kept rolling her eyes at me like I was annoying her. Ugh! I really had to control my tongue at this point :)

Ernie was not to be found, so eventually we gave up. I think I was more upset than Micah at this point about losing the Ernster, but it didn't take long for him to notice. Whenever he is tired, he ALWAYS asks for Ernie in the taxi. He asked at least twice, but I did some major distracting on the way home. He did fine without Ernie...until bedtime, and then he completely lost it for 2 hours. It was a rough evening for ALL of us, and it broke my heart every time I heard him cry out for "Ernie".

Here are a few older pictures of Micah with the original Ernie...

Thankfully, my parents and little sister arrived here on Friday. They did some major looking in the States before they arrived and brought Micah a new Ernie. Although it is a little different from his old friend, he doesn't seem to care at all. All that mattered to him was that it played music and had a silky tag on the side to play with. He was so excited with the replacement and immediately called it "Ernie". A big thank you to my sister-in-law, Anna, and sister, Blair, for searching for another Ernie too!! I believe we might have a few more Ernie's on the way! I'm learning you never can have too many back ups :)

Here he is showing off his new best friend.