Packing and fixing, or the not particularly crafty or game-y stuff I’m doing

This is going to be a kinda weird and random post, since I’ve been pretty busy this week, and we leave for a road trip tomorrow. Speaking of that, I picked a project! Last week I was really unsure what I wanted to bring on the trip. 

So I went to the yarn store. Specifically, I went to my LYS (local yarn store), which is a wonderful store even if it is a bit of a drive. I flipped through a bunch of patterns and finally decided on the Regal Cardigan from the Interweave Crochet Summer 2019 issue. 

I didn’t want the wool yarn listed in the pattern, so I picked a cotton fingering weight yarn that I liked better. It’s Circulo Anne in a variegated pink, so it will stand out against some of my favorite shirts (mostly shades of blue and green). 

I’m also taking a bag of embroidery floss, for emergencies. We’re scheduled to stop at a LYS at our destination, but just in the very unlikely case that I finish the cardigan early, I want something extra. 

For books, I’ve downloaded a bunch of online library books, plus I’m taking two physical books I like. Those are Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, and Mother-Daughter Book Camp. Because I can reread those a dozen times and not be bored. 

I’m taking a handful of other things, mostly boring unimportant stuff like clothes and food. So instead of discussing that for the rest of this entry, I’m going to discuss something that I fixed yesterday. And it’s somewhat road trip related  

I have a lot of stuffed animals. Mostly, they sit on my bed for moral support, and I throw them at my sister sometimes. But one of them is really special to me. There’s this one baby doll that I got when I was two, and I’ve kept her ever since. Baby, as my unimaginative two year old self named her, has a plastic head and arms and legs, with a cloth body. 

You can probably guess what’s happening to her. She’s starting to fall apart. When I was five, we went to Albuquerque to see my great-grandmother, and Baby’s arm ripped a bit, where the plastic attached to the fabric. My mom fixed her up with purple duct tape, which stayed until a few months ago when other bits started to rip, from age and wear and me still hugging her every night to go to sleep. Yesterday, I sewed all the tips up, patched a couple of holes, and tried to clean off the leftover stickiness from the duct tape. 

It scared me to do that, if I’m being honest. There hasn’t been more than a couple of nights since I got her where I’ve slept without her. I forgot her on one of our trips to visit my grandparents and I didn’t sleep at all that night. When my grandmother died, I don’t think I let go of Baby for a long while. I cried on Baby when middle school was too much, I told her everything about the cute girl I crushed on in sixth grade, I cried on her when my other grandma died and I was heartbroken. I took her on vacations and camping trips. I brought Baby on the 8th grade trip to Washington DC, even though my friend thought it was silly to still sleep with a doll and some of the people who saw me pull her out teased me about it later. Baby has been one of the big constants in my life. 

So it scared me to think that I could lose her. That old age and wear and tear could hurt a doll just as much as a human. That I could have to put her on a display shelf to be admired rather than on a bed to be loved. To think that if I wasn’t careful with her, she’d be gone. And I could never get her back. 

Dolls aren’t people. I know that. When I was younger, I read books like The Doll People and Toys Go Out, where the toys did have a life of their own and were definitely people. I tried every trick in the book to get Baby to talk to me and be a person, because she was a friend and I didn’t have many of those. 

She’s not a living or breathing person, but she’s a person to me. And if I lost her because I couldn’t fix her up, I would be devastated. So I fixed her. But I worried about it the whole time. 

So that’s what I did yesterday. I fixed the most important thing in my world and I packed for a road trip. Baby’s coming with me, just as always, and we’re going to have an adventure.