Goodbye Old Friend

This is the stupid, sentimental mommy stuff this blog was originally intended for.  I should probably preface this story with a note about how I tend to form emotional attachments to strange things like cars, bathrobes I never wear (that's a post for a different day), or in this case, a laundry basket that looks like a puppy.  

Recently, I had to replace my son's laundry basket.  It wasn't JUST a laundry basket.  It was his FIRST laundry basket and the beginning of his learning responsibilities.  I remember the day I brought it home and he was so excited to take off his clothes and put them in his "puppy baskik" each night at bath time.  The are numerous pictures (somewhere) of him running around the house with this basket on his head.  But I've noticed lately that the puppy basket had seen its better days.  Some of the rods that helped it hold its shape were missing; a casualty of a heroic sword fight, I'm sure.  It also had a few holes in the mesh, probably due to a toddler/preschooler climbing inside and rolling around in it.  When I told Joseph it was time for a new laundry basket, I offered to get him a new puppy basket.  I knew I wasn't ready to part with the puppy basket and I secretly hoped he wasn't either.  But I'm learning that I am way more attached to the things of his childhood than he is.  He was excited to pick out a new laundry basket and requested a dinosaur one.  Naturally, there were no dinosaur-shaped laundry baskets in the greater Jackson area (at least not that I found), so we settled on a basketball basket, complete with a backer board so he can shoot his clothes in and score on his way to take a bath.  He was incredibly excited to get it home and set it up.  I sadly, reluctantly disassembled the puppy basket and removed it from his room.  I set it beside the garbage can in our kitchen because I wasn't quite ready to throw it out yet.  I sent my husband a text message the the puppy basket had been replaced, that our son was fine with it, but I was not...  I was standing in the kitchen, crying over a LAUNDRY BASKET shaped like a PUPPY!  That evening I had to go to a meeting, so I asked my husband to take the puppy basket out with the trash while I was gone... I just couldn't bear it.  When I got home, the kids were in bed, and the puppy "baskik" was gone.  Just another sign of the times.  Sigh...