Evelyn brought Kaitlyn home about four years ago. Like any seven year old girl, Evelyn wanted a baby sister. She found Kaitlyn at Beverly’s in downtown SLO and it was love at first sight. It’s Kaitlyn’s winning smile and overly happy outlook on life that won Evelyn over. Personally, I didn’t see it. What I did see was the possibility of what we could do with Kaitlyn. In other words, how could we, as parents, mess with this new unwanted child? Evelyn is a big proponent of anthropomorphizing, which makes picking on her dolls or stuffed animals especially gratifying because of the emotional attachment she’s developed with these inanimate objects. She honestly thinks her dolls feelings will be hurt or that it will feel the pain of being hit in the face with a yo-yo.

It didn’t take long before James, Coral and I started messing with Kaitlyn. Putting her in high places where Evelyn could find her but would be unable to rescue her, like hanging from one of our exposed pipes. Naturally, Kaitlyn started disappearing. I think in an effort to protect her Evy would hide her from us and then forget about her. Poor Kaitlyn was missing once for about a year and a half. She survived and upon returning James’ response was, “Oh no…Kaitlyn’s back.” Evy, of course, was pretty excited about it.

Kaitlyn was recently discovered after another long disappearance. The other night while walking past Evy’s room I saw Coral in there holding a naked one-legged plastic baby in the air asking where its leg was. Turns out Kaitlyn was discovered by Elliott (our two year old) who welcomed her back into our lives with a traditional homecoming surprise of “pull your leg out of its socket and chew on it like a wad of bubble gum”. Personally, I think it was a territorial thing for Elliott and his way of letting Kaitlyn know that he’s the baby in the family.

Yesterday I found Kaitlyn’s missing limb under a chair and quickly attached it. When I showed Coral I asked her if she had an old shoelace I could borrow.
“You’re not going to hang Kaitlyn,” she told me.
“I won’t hang her by the neck, just by a foot, but I definitely want to make a little noose.”
Sadly, we couldn’t find a shoelace so we used decorative tape and Coral came up with what you see in the above photo.

Here’s the view from the foot of James’ bed. I’m not sure why we chose to hang Kaitlyn in James’ room, but probably because he dislikes her the most out of all of us. Well, I guess Elliott isn’t too fond of her either. After all, he’s the one that dismembered her.

Yes, I totally just wrote all of this about a stupid little doll. This is my life, people.