When you have two kids and a dog who misses the pack during the day, there are bound to be mishaps involving toys that weren’t put away properly. This is a tale of one of those toy tragedies, when an unwitting plastic princess lost her arm and a mom wasn’t sure how to break the bad news to her daughter.
Once upon a time, a USPS delivery man left a package at the front door of a townhouse. Everyone knows that the mailman is a benevolent soul, leaving books or CDS or other assorted sundries on the porch or inside the front door for happy customers everywhere. Everyone knows this but the self-appointed guard dog, who thinks every knock at the door brings with it certain doom upon the family he has sworn to protect, even if he’s home alone at the time. With the door shut and locked firmly between the delivery man and the dog, the dog has no one to avenge, until he spots the delicately limbed Cinderella, whose Barbie-esque arm hung tantalizingly off the low top of the coffee table.
In that state of mind, any arm will do. I’m willing to bet that not even a fairy godmother could bippity-boppity-boo Cinderella’s arm back together: Emmet had gnawed off Cinderella’s arm just below the shoulder joint and then nibbled the limb into three segments of nearly equal size, with the hand cleanly removed from the wrist. Yet Cinderella bravely soldiers on, a waxy smile plastered across her face as if nothing is amiss, like she could still perform a closed-palm princess wave with her left hand without the aid of a magic wand or talking mice.
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The extent of the damage wasn’t known to me as I was picking up the kids from daycare. All I knew from my husband, who came home at lunch and stumbled upon the carnage, was that Cinderella had been dismembered and that she was laying out where we would see her as we walked in the door. Faced with a choice between letting Lucy be surprised by the grisly site or to prep her, I chose the latter, willing to hear her wail the whole way home rather than to shock her when we walked through the door.
What I got was a shock of my own. She took the news with remarkable grace for a 3 ½ year old. Lucy decided that Emmet didn’t appear to feel “sorry enough” for what he had done, and I agreed. She would like to introduce an element of shame into the cycle of forgiveness by telling the dog groomer about this the next time Emmet gets a bath so “Miss Sandy will know what he did,” as Lucy put it. Somehow I doubt Emmet will care, but if it makes Lucy feel better about her loss, I’m ok with that.
