Rituals

"Is that you Rabbit?"
"Let's pretend it isn't and see what happens." A A Milne
DeBoy and I read 3 books every night. Go, Dog. Go!, Guess How Much I Love You, and a chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh. He's usually asleep about halfway through the Pooh story, so I don't know if he knows how any of them end. We've read all the way through the book about 6 times now. During those awful tornadoes that destroyed the south a couple of weeks ago, there was a story about a baby boy who got tossed 300 feet from his house, but survived. His mother didn't. I've been thinking about that baby, because not only did he lose his mother, he lost all the special little rituals they had together. DeBoy and the Queen both have their special bedtime routines. The Queen gets "little bitty juice" (which means just about a third of the regular amount), and DeBoy gets a small amount of juice and a small amount of chocolate milk (and yes, I know all about the not drinking anything at bedtime thing, but you try getting these two no-I-never-want-to-go-to-sleep children to bed without it - oh, yeah, and the juice is mixed with water). And the Queen picks out 3 books to read, usually by her Daddy, but sometimes I read them. Then we stay with her until she's asleep. When DeBoy and I read Go, Dog. Go! he "reads" the first 3 pages. And when we get to the yellow dog under a tree, we have to say, "yellow dog reading a blue book in a red hammock under a tree." And there's a fish with the dog under the water that we have to talk about. And we say, "The End." and talk about the 4 dogs on the end pages. So if something happened to me, he would lose that ritual. Which is why I'm posting about it, because people who would be taking care of him read this. I'm trying to do an inventory of our Christmas ornaments so that people know which ones belonged to us as children, and which ones were purchased for the kids and by whom. And I have some of their special baby stuff saved (like the sweater sets my mother knitted) that I need to label so people know which belongs to which child.
And I think about that other baby and I hope he is doing OK, and that the people who are taking care of him were able to salvage his special toys and knew about at least some of his rituals. Because his life will never be the same, and that's just a scary thing. I have to stop now because I can't see what I'm typing.