Leo particularly loves chewing up soft toys/stuffed animals, gutting them first, then chewing the remains slowly. The end of the toy comes after several tug-of-war sessions with me, when the fabric starts ripping apart.
I’ve bought Leo several toys sold as pet toys, and also some designed for human children, after first checking there weren’t any hazards, things like small plastic eyes that he might pull out and choke on. Leo has enjoyed destroying every toy I’ve given him.
Some time in the past year, I opened a box of Nigel’s stuff. I remembered him looking through it and deciding to put everything back in the box, and also that among those things were some small soft toys.
Nigel wasn’t particularly sentimental about “stuff”, but he kept the animals for some reason. He didn’t tell me why, and I didn’t ask, but I knew that if he wanted me to know, or thought I should, he’d tell me about them. He didn’t, though, and I felt he should be able to have that “secret”.
Finding those soft toys gave me pause. I had to assume the animals must’ve been important to him for some reason, and that meant I didn’t want to just “get rid of them”, and instead I wanted to do something that felt appropriate to me, because they seemed to mean something to Nigel, but I also wanted it to be something that he might have done with them himself.
About this same time, I’d just bought Leo some new dog toys to chew up, and that’s when it hit me: I’d give the soft toys to Leo to play with (destroy…). I knew that would make him very happy, which, in turn, would’ve made Nigel happy (he loved all our furbabies, but he was smitten with Leo, the last furbaby to join our family).
The first of these animals, a turtle, had sewn-on eyes, so it (“Mr Turtle”) was safe to give to Leo. As I expected, he was ecstatic and spent many happy hours slowly destroying it, just not anywhere near completely—until recently.
I then gave him a small blue stuffed dog (“B-Dog”), but that had plastic eyes and a plastic nose (in the photo above) I had to prise out first, and that meant finding the backer that helps the eyes and nose hold onto the fabric, kind of like a nut keeps a bolt in place. One of those backers stayed in the animal, and I had to perform keyhole surgery to remove it. B-Dog is still in one piece, though stuffing removal has left it a bit thinner. It’s also lost its plastic bottle-like squeaky thing (something I knew was well large enough that Leo couldn’t choke on it).
There’s one last small animal left, a white bear with some patches with red hearts on the bottom of its feet, lining its ears, and on bowtie. I think—though I obviously don’t know—that it may have been a Valentine’s Day gift to or from Nigel’s partner before me, so giving that to Leo feels especially appropriate. But, it was absolutely filthy—I can remember it sitting out when I first arrived in New Zealand, so it must’ve been dusty. I washed it recently, and left it to dry naturally. It’s ready for Leo when he’s ready for it.
I may not have any idea where Nigel’s soft toys came from, or why he kept them, but I think giving them to our little boy Leo was absolutely the right thing to do. It was an opportunity for Leo’s other daddy to still provide for him, to still help make Leo happy, through me. At any rate, it made both Leo and me happy, and that would make Nigel happy, too.
A footnote: I mentioned two of the soft toys’ names above, but all of the stuffed toys the dogs had over the years had names, and for a simple reason: The dogs learned the names and would go get the toys on command. For example, I can say to Leo, “Where’s B-Dog?” and he’ll go running to the last place he had the toy. All our dogs did that, but Leo does seem particularly good at it.
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