The Pooh of Doom

I love me some Winnie the Pooh. Now, don't get me wrong; I don't mean I love me a demin jumper with Winnie & Piglet embroidered on a pocket or anything like that. I just mean that growing up, Winnie the Pooh, particularly in The Blustery Day, was a fixture of my childhood. Old school Pooh. All of this My Friends Tigger & Pooh with Darby (um, hello, where's my boy Christopher Robin?) and the super sleuthy learning experience garbage is just not something I can get on board with it (although they did keep Pooh's "think think think," which I appreciate it, even if it is in some obnoxious mystery-solving ditty--ugh).

So it seemed natural to me that among the plethora of Build-a-Bears and other assorted stuffed animals, Ethan should have a Pooh or two thrown in there. In a moment of ultimate cheesy weakness, Husband bought me a talking Pooh long before we even had Ethan. A stay up in NH with friends of ours who did have kids introduced us to their talking Pooh and dork that I am, I feel in love with all the silly little things he said, "A very large Pooh bear hug would be nice about now.....yes, like that," and so on. This is embarrassing for me to admit, as I've not really been a stuffed animal type of girl since puberty. But anyway, we had that Pooh before the Dawn of the Age of Ethan. Then, somewhere in the mix of babyhood gift-receiving (and buying), we wound up with a "My First Pooh" bear as well. So fine. Two poohs.

This posed no problem for us at all until Sunday night. When, in a solid sleep, Ethan rolled onto his talking Pooh and compressed its tummy enough to set off the assorted recorded messages that during the day would make him giggle.

However. When your Pooh bear wakes you from a dead sleep in the middle of the night and starts demanding you hug him? And you're 4? Your world is bound to be rocked just a little bit (and by "little bit" I mean a WHOLE GIANT MESS OF SCARED).

Husband happened to have fallen asleep with Ethan in his room, so he was there for the Chucky-esque moment. At the time, he said, Ethan handled it well. Sat up, called for Daddy in fear, whimpered for a few minutes & then quickly fell back to sleep as soon as he was in Husband's protective grasp. You'd have thought the problem was solved.

Except that by morning, the talking Pooh incident had ballooned in Ethan's mind to consist of Pooh speaking in angry voice and floating above his bed. Um. Yeah, that's what I said. Has someone been letting this kid watch Creature Double Features while I'm not looking??!! Who let him see The Freaking Exorcist, starring Winnie the Pooh?!

Bedtime on Monday night posed quite a conundrum. First Husband and I had to explain to Ethan the mechanism by which Pooh "spoke" to him over and over again; I offered to show him by pressing on Pooh's tummy, but by this point, the Poohs had been banished to my room and Ethan refused the very thought of seeing them ever again. We talked about how dreams are just pictures our brain makes while we're asleep, about how our imaginations like to play while we rest and sometimes they make up stories that make us uncomfortable.

Ethan thoroughly inspected his room for any trace of the menacing Pooh doll before consenting to start our bedtime routine. I fully expected bedtime to drag on into the wee hours, but I think he was so restless from his nightmares the night before that he was powerless to fight the urge to sleep. Thankfully he slept soundly and nightmare-free through the night. But I guess that means that these guys are going to be setting up camp in mama's room for the duration:

c'mon, they're harmless!!!

or are they?