I feel it is safe to say that at some point in time, every toddler has that one thing they want to take everywhere. Which is how they get to be so dirty. Finding the time to wash the thing is the trickiest. Can’t be too close to nap time during the day or bedtime at night. If you are like me and work during the day you have to be sneaky about it and pray they don’t notice you putting it in the wash. They could leave it somewhere for over an hour but the second they see it disappearing into that machine, Lord have mercy on you.

We were at a basketball game Monday night and if he had not just been woken up we wouldn’t have taken the blanket to the game, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do . That is when I realized, this thing is FILTHY! He was slinging it everywhere, ya know being a 3 year old, and wollering around with it. It wasn’t until he was sitting on my lap with it kinda wrapped around himself that I smelled it. Oh the smell of little boys!

My son is one of those whose body heat sky rockets as soon as he falls asleep. If he falls asleep snuggling with you, you both end up sweating. Add on to that by him sometimes putting a corner of it in his mouth, and his thumb sucking and you can imagine. I didn’t think about it being that bad smelly. Then, it hit me. He spent all day with his great grandma because his sitter was sick, which meant EXTRA snuggles!! I kept hoping the people around us couldn’t smell it like I could. This would just so happen to be a boys game, so the place was packed!!

By the time the game was over it is bedtime so I couldn’t go home and throw it in the wash. I had to wait for him to be gone the next day. He doesn’t take it with him to his sitter’s house and I get off at 2 in the afternoon which meant I went home and started a load of laundry. I had about 2 hours before going to pick him up and going to yet another game. I knew the washing wouldn’t take too long. It is the drying that holds up progress. Like I said earlier though, we don’t usually take the blanket to games so when we got home and he couldn’t find his blanket…here comes the worry. You can see it all over his face, hear it in his voice. This thing is the first thing he wants when we get home. “My lightning blankey!!!!!” I tell him it is in the dryer and he beats me to it. He opens the door and pulls out the holy grail! Along with the other clean clothes. Now Lightning doesn’t smell like little boy anymore. He smells like Snuggle!

“Security is a strange thing, a myth that the brain allows in exchange for a brief moment of peace.”
― Alessandra Torre, To Have