Alice takes it to the mattresses.

Alice has giraffe toy puppet. We bought last fall after a trip to the dog store, wherein I proceeded to play with it for my own amusement (including biting The Human Male’s nose with it*) and then promptly spilled my soy latte on it. It wasn’t a huge mess and the store didn’t care, but I felt guilty and bought it. I then hoped that Alice would enjoy it as much as I did.

She did. Within days, she bit both ears and horns off, then ripped the stitching out straight across his head and started pulling the stuffing out. So it went onto the shelf of other battered toys with fluff leaking from their bodies until a day when I could sit down and stitch them all back up.

A few weeks ago, her toy bin was looking a little low and there was stuffing all over the house. I decided it was time. Alice and I sat on the couch and watched Psych, and sewed up all of her babies. She was thoroughly confused as to why one, I was actually sitting for once and not running around; and two, why she wasn’t allowed to play with her toys when she was sitting right there. She finally passed out from frustration, and woke up to an overflowing toy basket. It was like Dog Christmas.

She became reacquainted with her old favorite toys, including the giraffe. Well, now it’s more like Frankengiraffe. I’d kept the ears and horns for a while, but then decided I was never going to get around to fixing her toys and tossed them. So now it kind of looks like a creepy giraffe-print snake dreamed up in a mad scientist’s lab. But the unpleasing aesthetic is lost on her. Alice loves Frankengiraffe.

Alice loves Frankengiraffe so much, it’s become one of the more commonly-toted toys (along with Babyman, her boombox, Mousie, tennis balls, her blanket, and the entryway rug). She also likes to play games with him—she’ll hide him somewhere, run away, and then come back and act like she unearthed a great treasure. We find him in funny places—under chairs, sticking out from under the bed, in the bathroom, in the closet.

This morning I woke up from a pleasant night’s sleep and rolled over. I felt something lumpy and a little bit gooey underneath me. I pull up the blankets to find the giraffe head in my bed, soaked in drool.

The first thought that popped into my mind: The Godfather. But with dog toys.

*For everyone who thinks I harass The Human Male too much, I would like it to be noted for the record that his favorite game with Alice is to put her tennis ball on me when I’m laying down and have her jump on me.