Sunday Afternoon

Sunday afternoon, everyone fell asleep except for Maylan. When Brandon woke up, he went up to his room and found this on his bed:

He was quite confused about how his stuffed animals could get themselves dressed in his clothes. He thought that Maylan had done it, but there was a little bit of doubt in his mind. She wouldn't confess. Anyway, it all made me think back to my daughter long ago and a favorite little friend of hers know as "Mr. Scary Skeleton":

Mr. Scary Skeleton joined our family a few weeks before Brandon was born and Maylan turned 3. She saw him at Target amongst the Halloween decorations and just had to have him. Maylan is not, and never has been, into princesses and girly stuff, but she did go through a serious "creepy phase" and Mr. Scary Skeleton fit right into that. She carried him everywhere with her, to restaurants, the library, anywhere we went. I remember one time we had to visit her aunt's High School. We were walking through the campus and she was of course holding him. All of the kids noticed and laughed and one kid said, "Nice doll, kid," and then laughed. She wasn't fazed. She loved Mr. Scary Skeleton. Included in this creepy phase of hers, which lasted for over a year, was an intense love of all things Scooby, and a desire for a "creepy" wedding when she grew up. She said she wanted to decorate her wedding with spider webs and dead roses. My favorite Scary Skeleton story happened a few months after we got him. We would put Maylan to bed and she would play in her room with her toys and animals for a while before falling asleep. She loved to dress them all up and arrange them in strange ways. So one night after she fell asleep, Ryan and I went into her room and dressed up Mr. Scary Skeleton in some of her doll clothes and then set him up in a chair near her bed. I think we propped a book up in his hands or something like that, too. Anyway, we snuck up to her door to watch her reaction when she woke up. She sits up in bed, looks around, looks at him, rubs her eyes and looks again. You can almost see her thinking this situation through. She gets up and goes over to him, puts her hand on her hip and asks, "What have you been doing??!!" We had such a good time with him over the years. He still kicks around our house and every once in a while one of the kids will get him out. He'll be forever loved, even though Maylan has outgrown her creepy phase and now dreams of a regular wedding, thank goodness.