Unseen creativity

There is nothing like coming home from work, walking into the house, and immediately realizing there is something amiss. Take yesterday for example: I walked in the door and there on the floor of the foyer was a large paper bag full of fuzz. The sort of fuzz you might pull out of your belly button but on a much larger scale. A large enough scale to fill the paper bag to the top and then some.

If that wasn't enough to pique my curiosity, laying scattered around the paper bag were the heads of various stuffed animals. There were the heads of at least two teddy bears, a dog, a parrot, a hippo, and what I think was a chicken.

Now DQ collects stuffed animals. Lots of stuffed animals. She has more than any 10 other kids combined. And since most kids collect stuffed animals, when I say she had a lot, I mean it. Most of her stuffed animals have meaning to her. She has small ones like Webkinz or Beany Babies, big ones from various trips to Disney or other places, and even some she picked out herself from Toys R Us. She also has countless others that aren't so meaningful. For example, stuffed animals she won from the crane machines at an arcades or Chuck E Cheese. (DQ is probably the only kid that can successfully pull a prize over 90% of the time on those things.) Anyway, I'm getting off track, but I think you get the idea: She has a lot of stuffed animals.

After staring at the scene of such slaughter for a moment, I called down my primary suspect. My son. But the look of surprise on his face when he saw the carnage gave away the fact that he was innocent of this crime. So I called down my other suspect. She took a look and said "I'll get rid of that in a minute."

"What happened?"

"Those were all the cheap stuffed animals."

"Yea, but what did you do to them?"

(My son looked just as interested in the answer as I was, obviously bothered by the fact that he didn't think of tearing the heads off her stuffed animals first.)

"I took the stuffing out."

"I can see that. Why?"

"Because I was making Halloween costumes for my other stuffed animals..."

"Oh."

What do you say to that? She was being creative, she was using her imagination, she said she was going to clean up the mess even if she hadn't done so yet, and she was paring down her animal collection. So I said the only thing that came to mind: "Cool! Let me see some!"