Last Thanksgiving we went to Atlanta and visited the Georgia Aquarium. One of the souvenirs from that trip was a magnet of a turtle.
Eleanor has been taking this turtle magnet to bed with her ever since.
One day this past month, we couldn’t find the turtle. The girls have been throwing things out of their cribs recently, so it’s not unusual to find things on the floor when we get them in the morning or after their naps. We didn’t see the turtle on the floor. We looked under the cribs. We looked under the sheets of the crib mattress (where we once found the turtle inexplicably jammed). We looked in the drawer under the crib, in case it had slipped into the drawer somehow. We looked under the dresser. It was gone. We were in trouble.
Albert had previously visited the Georgia Aquarium again to see if he could buy us a spare turtle, but they were sold out. He did find out that the magnets sold at the Aquarium are made by Clay Critters. We found the turtle in their extended catalog (Sea Turtle MJ0026) and placed an order for two replacements. In the meantime, we appeased Eleanor with her previous transitional object, a blue star from the shape sorter toy. She looked at the star curiously, and seemed tentatively satisfied.
Fortunately, we found the turtle the next day. It was under the dresser, but in the very back, near one of the legs. I can only imagine that Eleanor threw it across the room, where it landed on the floor, slid under the dresser, and ended up in the back.
The new turtles arrived a few days later. Their coloring is a little bit different, and they lack the “Georgia Aquarium” text. The original turtle also differs from these new ones in that the magnet has come unglued. We may try to swap the Georgia Aquarium turtle for one of these newer ones since we have a spare, but we haven’t gotten around to doing that yet.