Where's Blue Dog?

Quinn still has a stuff animal that he sleeps with at night. It's "Blue Dog", who is so named because, well, he's blue, and he's a dog (the name has nothing whatsoever to do with Blue's Clue since the kids don't watch that). Blue Dog has been through a lot over the past six plus years. The worst was the Andy incident (Grammy and Pop Pop's dog) where Andy bit and ripped open his nose (why Andy had to rip into Blue Dog and couldn't just sniff his butt like he would with other dogs I don't know). Luckily Blue Dog was survived and was repaired with some emergency surgery (if you look closely you can see his stitches).

I can tell Quinn's already getting to the point where he's somewhat outgrowing him, but he'll still ask for him at night. That's usually not a problem, except for a couple of times over the past months where Blue Dog has become an impromptu football or soccer ball during the day, or is moved to some other part of the house for a rousing game of hide and seek or something else along those lines. So there have been several incidents over the past couple of months where once it's bedtime we'll hear Quinn ask "Where's blue Dog?" This is then followed by Ginger and / or myself wandering around the house for a bit until we locate Blue Dog and give him to Quinn. Because of that we have a new rule that Blue Dog isn't to leave Quinn's bedroom (this in theory makes locating him easier on us at night since we have less ground to cover). While we have this rule, it seems it rarely gets obeyed. This morning when we saw Blue Dog being used as a football between him and Catherine we reminded him of the rule and off he went to return Blue Dog to his room.

So it was a bit of a surprise tonight when Quinn asked for Blue Dog. I looked all over the room and couldn't find him. Turned the bed upside down and went through all the covers. I even got Ginger involved and had her look. Couldn't find him. Then I ended up wandering around downstairs to see if he had ended up down there somehow. I searched downstairs even though Quinn doesn't *think* he took him down there, although later he thought he might be in the library (he wasn't). So after about 20 minutes of looking and having Quinn get out of bed and help look, we decided to call it quits. Quinn was looking pretty forlorn, and Ginger suggested giving him hippo (another of his stuffed animals from when he was a baby). I tried that and hippo was deemed an unacceptable substitute for Blue Dog (thrown out of bed and across the room he was). I was starting to think this might end up being a long night, when I decided to offer him a Nerf football instead. To my surprise this was apparently more than acceptable and and even desirable as he wound up going to sleep clutching his football (although I will add he also wanted his stuffed Pluto on the bed).

Being the obsessive compulsive type person I am though, I couldn't stop looking for Blue Dog even after Quinn went to sleep. I completely scoured Quinn and Catherine's room while they slept with a mini flashlight looking everywhere. After two passes through each of their rooms, I decided it wasn't there and moved on. After looking all over the house, I was getting pretty frustrated because how hard is it to find one stuffed animal in the house? Seriously, it shouldn't be that hard. I mean Quinn had been told that morning to return to Blue Dog to his room, and no one remembered playing with Blue Dog after that so logic dictated he must be in Quinn's room somewhere. I was just about to go completely nuts (sure, go ahead and make the joke that it wouldn't be that far of a trip) when I finally managed to locate him after over a half an hour of searching. Turns out where I eventually found him was in the guest room under the bed. How he ended up there since we had told Quinn to return him to his room I have no idea, but I left him on the dresser beside Quinn's clock so he'll see him tomorrow. I am debating on playing innocent and claiming to have no knowledge of how he ended up there when I get asked about it tomorrow morning and stating that Blue Dog must have simply returned on his own.