A Clock

Dear Addie,

We have a clock. It’s a beautiful clock that came from your late great grandmother often referred to as “Garara” by you being your version of Grandma Clara. It used to reside in a rather pristine home that was adorned with light-colored carpet, not a smidge of dust, with meticulously placed knick-knacks & photo frames. Fast forward to today and it’s found its second home with us, which dare I say is a far cry from its previous dwellings and is now home to a salamander toy from the movie Frozen 2. Surely a questionable sight for anyone who enters our home, and I can only imagine what “Garara” is thinking looking down on this scene.

If we rewind a bit to Christmas day, this cute blue salamander was a gift from big brother Gabe in a pack of Fisher-Price Little People Frozen 2 characters (say that 3x’s fast – yikes). Yes, one of the 3 gifts you opened that day. It took a solid 6 weeks to finish opening any other gifts, but I digress…

You opened these Little People rather excitedly, feverishly stimming with joy as if it was just what you wanted! The perfect gift if you will! You lined them up calling them all by name… “Anna”, “A Princess” (Elsa), “N” (Sven), “A snowman” (Olof), “Marshmallow” the giant monster who was banished and tossed across the room immediately, and finally “Cuckoo” (Bruni the salamander). You grabbed “Cuckoo” walked him over to the clock, opened the door and gently and meticulously placed him inside, leaving the door open. You stepped back and looked at it with a big smile, and then bounced about on your merry way leaving the rest of us a bit confused at the whole scene.

The next few weeks would be a pattern of us removing the salamander, closing the door to the clock, and returning “Cuckoo” back to his tribe of characters, only for you to return him to what you felt was his destined home inside that clock. This is when I decided that the parental wisdom of “pick and choose your battles” was where I was at with this. I feared that the more I removed it, the more frustrated you would get and that the clock could be at risk of potentially being damaged in some way when this was an innocent thing you were doing, and our house is not something that would be featured in a pottery barn catalog anyway… so that’s where “Cuckoo” could stay. But like everything you do, there’s a reason and it generally takes us a minute to figure out the why.

Fast forward to this week and dad wins the prize of finally solving this mystery, and of course, it seems obvious, but it also almost seemed too obvious to be the right answer.

This week I was watching the Olympics (way too late mind you) and I couldn’t help but keep looking at that little lizard, happily sitting inside that clock, staring at me. I found myself suddenly consumed with figuring out why you chose to make him live in there. The obvious thing of you referring to him as “Cuckoo” made us always believe you thought it was a bird, but it was clearly a lizard and you do know the difference between the two – so it seemed as if it was something else.

Talking about it with dad the following day led him to start googling Cuckoo clocks. Mark it! Something I’m quite confident he never thought he’d be researching on his phone at 6:00 in the morning and ta-da! A bluebird is the most common Cuckoo for said clock and digging a little deeper discovered Peppa Pig, a cartoon that you have a love/hate relationship with, actually has a Cuckoo clock character that looks shockingly like your little lizard friend named, wait for it, “Cuckoo!” looking a little closer at the salamander his tongue is sticking out looking ever so much like the beak of the Peppa Pig bird. Thinking back to Christmas day and when you opened it, you were SO excited like you finally figured out what that clock thing actually was! A Cuckoo clock missing its bird!

You see Addie, we live in a digital world now so it’s not exactly a version of a clock you’d see every day – right up there on the list with the rotary phone (which we also actually have 😉) but cartoons often still represent things like this not of our current times. So, the clock made sense to you once you added its bird or look-alike lizard in this situation. You were excited because you thought you had solved the puzzle! That mystery object was in fact a Cuckoo Clock or at least that’s what you now saw it as.

The part that is not so obvious is the fact that you don’t always enjoy Peppa Pig because you have a love/hate relationship with farm animals. A whole show full of pigs – not exactly your jam sometimes. But adding to your ever consistent “predictably unpredictable” mentality everything is on your terms day to day whether you’re gonna like it or not. Ask your OT about balloons sometime – that could be another whole letter. You must’ve watched a few episodes enough to have seen the bird and find the association with the clock. Honestly, I never would’ve bet on this having come from that show, but it seemed like a dead ringer, only reiterating the fact that I should never gamble.

This week we finally think we figured out why your lizard friend lives in our clock. I can’t help but wonder if “Garara” could’ve ever imagined her clock would make its second act as that of a Cuckoo – every ounce of it living a different life and purpose in our home? I do however think that while she may not have seen this coming, she’s smiling down on you happy as ever that something that was hers is something so special to you.

Another mystery solved!

Love you Ad!

Mom