Comfort objects

First, breaking news: when I got home today, Jolly was BAREFOOT. Our nanny reported that he was trying to pull his socks off, so she removed them. After that she asked him if he wanted the socks back on, and he said no. (She was shocked also.) He spent the next 2 hours barefoot and went to bed without socks. This is a major paradigm shift in Jolly's universe.

On to the subject of this post: while Jolly did not wear socks to bed tonight, he did require two objects to take to bed with him:

1) a wooden knife. This is from his fruit-cutting playset (the fruit sticks together with velcro). While I was making dinner and he was playing with the rice cooker in the kitchen, he suddenly announced "Knife!" and then we had to go find his wooden knife. I put it aside during dinner to keep him from dipping it in the ketchup, but he had to have it in order to brush his teeth, and to go to bed.

2) a ceramic decoration featuring a carrot top-shaped house with a hinged door that swings open to reveal two bunnies painting Easter eggs. This was a present from my Nana when I was a kid, and I still keep it on my dresser. We were all in the bedroom sorting clothing yesterday, and I showed it to Jolly to keep him entertained. He is now obsessed with it, and imperiously shouts "Hase!" (Hase=rabbit in German) when he wants to play with it, as he did after putting on his pajamas tonight. In toddler limit-testing fashion he hit me with it while we were reading stories, and threw an epic tantrum when I took it away. He got it back after he calmed down and we finished the story, and could not bear to be parted with it for sleeping.

While Jolly used to burrow into his pillow immediately upon getting into bed for naps or bedtime, now he generally wants to sit up ("Sitz!") and look at a book (or a ceramic rabbit house), even when it is too dark to see the pictures. The other day he took the book "Moo Baa La La La" to bed for a nap and we could hear his narration of "moo!" "lalala!" "neigh!" when he got to the different animals.