Farewell, Penguino

Penguino looked exactly like this.

I like this one better, though

On Sunday I took Child 2 and his buddy to a birthday party. They both got gift bags on their way out, both of which contained tiny little plastic baby penguins. The penguins were immediately named Penguino (pronounced Pen-GWEE-no. I guess these penguins were italian) and on the way home they fought a valiant battle in the backseat, complete with laser penises. No, I'm serious. They had penises that shot lasers.

After the friend was dropped off, Child 2 and I went to Safeway, where he sat in the cart, accompanied by Penguino. About 10 minutes after we had gotten home, however, he asks "Where is Penguino??"

Apparently Penguino had been left in the cupholder attached to the cart and was forgotten about. "We have to go back and find him!" he insisted, eyes welling up.

How can I resist a sad, teary child who just lost his new best friend? So, we got back in the car and went back to the store. On the way, I said "I just want you to be prepared for the possibility that we won't be able to find him." He was sad, but he understood.

Once there, the shopping cart was not in the place where we had left it so we had no choice but to look inside every cupholder attached to every shopping cart, both in the parking lot and inside the store.

And so we did. We were there for a while. We stopped everybody in the store, sometimes more than once, and we looked inside everybody's cupholder. Sadly, Penguino didn't turn up.

We ended up back in the parking lot, double checking the carts out there, and I asked him what he wanted to do.

He looked really sad, and he responded "I guess it's time for me to say goodbye to Penguino."

Um. Heart? Broken.

We got back in the car and went home. Once there, I opened the door for him and he sat there, still looking sad.

"I miss Penguino," he said.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, bud." I answered; I felt so bad for him.

"HEY! Can I go play with blocks now??" He asked.

And the moment was over.

---

I know I had said that I was going to blog the results of Friday night's Twitter group blog post party but so far I've been far too lazy to grab the transcript of the chat and put it into post form. Unless anybody wants to volunteer to take that on for me.....

image courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

---