The Trauma We Caused

We went to Mom and Dad's house yesterday to eat their yummy grilled lunch and watch the Bama game (no comments on that part, ok?) He-Man is in a stage of wanting to take some sort of toy to every place he goes. We're fine with that if we're going to see family but it's the FORGETTING to bring the toy home that is the biggest problem with the phase.

So when He-Man took Ninja Turtle Don (the dumbed-down version of the new turtles -- no more trying to teach kids the tiniest fragment of art history by keeping his original name, "Donatello") over to my folks' house, I knew it was probable we would forget him...but we'd get him back later like we always do.

I guess the frequency of leaving toys at their house got Mom and Dad into a silly mood and they decided to email the following picture to us:



Then Mom and Dad called us to tell us to check our email.

So we all gather around the computer and chuckled. All of us EXCEPT He-Man.

We all have a good time laughing at the photo and decide that it probably wouldn't be a good idea for He-Man to see it. But when he came running around the corner to see what was up, our curiosity about his reaction caused us to show him the focus of our enjoyment.

The poor boy had the most panicked look on his face. Goodness. We are so mean!

We started doing some serious damage control and because he heard his G-Jo and P-Paw on the phone assuring him Don was safe now, we were able to keep him relatively calm about it.

But Rocky thought it would be funny to continue messing with his baby brother's little mind.

Grr. Big brothers can be so mean sometimes.

Henry finally convinced He-Man that Don was fine because he's a Ninja Turtle and was able to beat up the bad guys (thankfully he doesn't know that is G-Jo's hand in the picture!!!) and is now safe and sound. But we think there is still a little bit of internalized trauma he is working through. He wandered into our room and bed last night saying that he had a bad dream. Today after nap, he started to immediately ask if we could go to G-Jo's house to get Don. We think he is still worried about him.

So G-Jo is bringing Don to Henry at work tomorrow. Hopefully having the Turtle back home will relieve a little bit of the anxiety we have caused this poor child.