A Mother's Heartache

We had a wonderfully busy weekend. On Saturday we were invited to the LA Zoo by my best friend Jenny and her family. You may remember we took Lily to the Santa Barbara zoo a few months ago. She didn't seem too interested then in much of anything we saw there, so we weren't sure how she would like it this go around, but it was a good time to hang out with some good friends. As it turns out, Lily had a great time! She was much more animated and had a lot of fun looking at the animals. For whatever reason, she was fascinated with the alligators and tried very hard to say "alligator". I will post pictures of our trip later, but this post is not actually about our trip to the zoo. This post is about who we lost at the zoo:

This is Lily's precious Snowflake. He was given to Lily by a good friend of my mother-in-law's shortly after we got home from China. This is the friend, along with Panda, she takes with her everywhere. He eats breakfast with her every morning. He goes with us to the grocery store. When we went to Lily's music and gymnastics classes, I had to convince Lily that Snowflake needed to stay in the car to take a "nap" while we went to class. So of course there was no question that he would accompany us on our trip to the zoo. He had a great time too and got to see all kinds of fun animals along with us. At some point during the end of our day, I noticed Snowflake was not in his spot in the bottom of Lily's stroller. I desperately searched everywhere...throughout the stroller, in the diaper bag, in my purse, I asked Jenny if perhaps she had gotten a hold of him somewhere along the way. No. Robert, being the best dad ever, volunteered to retrace our steps back to the last place we all remembered seeing him. Lily and I poked around the gift shops while we waited. By the time he came back, Lily was asleep in her stroller, and Robert was empty handed. My heart broke. We headed back to the car, hoping some kind person would find him and return him to the lost and found. In the meantime, we called Robert's mom to ask her where her friend had gotten Snowflake so we could try to replace him. We got home and I immediately got on ebay to look for another one (2 of them will be on their way here this week!). But it won't be the same. Lily seemed to do just fine through the evening. We thought, maybe she'll be ok...no big deal...until it was time for bed. We were saying our prayers with her and as we finished, she looked down into her bed, and it happened. She asked for him...several times. We didn't know what to say. We put her down, turned out the lights and prayed for the best. She was exhausted so she was out pretty quickly without much fuss. The next morning, Robert went to get her up. As he got her out of bed, she started looking around for Snowflake. Thankfully she was distracted by her Pooh bear, so he sufficed for the time being. For whatever reason, I seem to be having a harder time with this than Lily is. I thought my heart was breaking for her, but maybe it's more for me. Is that normal? I'm sitting here in tears as I type this. Why am I so emotional over a stuffed bear? Maybe it's the association I have of Lily and Snowflake...together...all.the.time. I'm anxious to see how she reacts when "Snowflake" comes home later this week. I have a feeling I may be rejoicing more than she will! We'll see. In the meantime, we will keep checking in with the zoo's lost and found (obviuosly no luck yet). We figure someone must have found him. Genereally speaking, when you find something, you either turn it in or you keep it. If whoever found our precious Snowflake kept him, I hope he will be loved in his new home as much as he was here.