Alice the Mole

Everybody knows a kid that has a favorite stuffed animal that they always carry around with them. Maybe you were one of those kids at some point. I know I had a favorite stuffed panda named Barry (although it was probably Beary in my head at the time, I prefer to remember him as a Barry), and later a favorite stuffed seal named Freddy, who was the frontman for a stuffed animal band that I managed - Freddy & the Burgers.

Ever since my daughter Jane was born, my wife and I have been trying to provide her with optimum candidates to be that Favorite Stuffed Animal. The Hobbes to her Calvin. I think I was always concerned that she would wind up with a unnaturally pink Winnie the Pooh doll as her favorite, or worse, a creepy blinking plastic baby. In an effort to offset this danger, we would acquire stuffed animals that we deemed sufficiently cute, sturdy, and of a reasonable size, and place them with her in her car seat, stroller, or the like. Sadly, none of them took. Not the gray Ugly Doll, not the blue-black octopus, not the awesome giraffe, nothing. In fact, one of the first things she latched on to was a creepy blinking plastic baby, whose origin is unclear, and whom she named Dolly and scribbled with pen on its head, so that it looked even more upsetting. To counteract Dolly, I bought a less unsettling and softer doll that she successfully adopted as her favorite and named Baby Jane. Unfortunately it acquired an unexplained stain on its face that is there to this day. As far as animals went, Jane settled on a litter of different stuffed dogs (Seiko, Allie, Puffy, Tuffy, Allie's Mom, a cat named Tiger) as her favorites, which she would rotate in for car trips and such. At home, she would usually sit them all down together as a general assembly of sorts that would make decisions on what to play that day, and she would occasionally teach them school lessons. They were also known to be placed randomly around the house with makeshift blankets draped over them (napkins, magazines, DVDs, etc) for "naptime". They are still an active body.

When my second daughter Lucy was born, we felt it was time to give it another shot. As her first real Christmas present, we bought her a stuffed mole named Alice. I'm generally not crazy about the pre-assigned names, but in this case it seemed right. Alice the Mole is a Granimal, which is a line of hand-stitched animals from a French company called Latitude Enfant, and it's pretty awesome. It's cute, it's soft, it's sturdy, it's a little weird, and it's of a reasonable size. What more could you ask for? Anyway, Lucy has totally taken to it. She has a tendency to gnaw on its head and grip its mole nose, which I think is a really good sign. Jane has accepted Alice as Lucy's property and has tried to help us with our plan, placing Alice back on Lucy's lap whenever she is dropped. Will it stand the test of time as Lucy realizes she has options in the stuffed friend world? Watch the video and judge for yourself. (Warning: It's fairly uneventful.)

BaeRating: A