I was sitting in the back seat of the car with Allie as usual coming home from Costco earlier, entertaining her and chatting with her, making vroom vroom sounds together imitating the motorcycles that passed by (or rather, that Mr. W, aka Speed Racer, passed), when I forgot what I said or did, but I laughed. Allie laughed with me. And then I stopped laughing, but she kept laughing. I thought, “Boy, I’m really funny.” She kept laughing. “She really has a good time with me.” She was still laughing. I noticed the laugh sounded unnatural, and then her face deadpanned and the corners of her mouth dropped, just like that. It was then that I realized, “HEY, that was a FAKE LAUGH.” I told Mr. W that my baby daughter was fake-laughing at me, and listening to me describe to him what had just happened, Allie fake-laughed again. I whipped out the cameraphone and took a video.

My .mp4 videos aren’t loading correctly on my image hosting site for whatever reason, so those of you who aren’t my social network website friends, sorry, I can’t bring you this video via the blog. 🙁 I can show it to you in person. 🙂

After shooting the aforementioned fake laugh video, which Allie was cooperative in, I turned the cameraphone around and showed her the video. She wanted to watch more videos, so I showed her what I had on the phone in reverse chronological order. The videos were all of Allie — Allie excitedly yelling “Whoa!” at the surfers on the waves at our San Diego vacation last week, Allie “driving” the Elmo car ride at Babies R Us, etc. — and then I got to the last video I shot of Dodo. This sounds morbid, but I have two video clips of him from the day before he passed away. I played the one that shows Dodo taking a slow careful walk from the bathroom area of the bedroom to our walk-in closet across the room, where he settled in his usual resting spot. “Who’s that?” I asked Allie quietly as she watched intently.
She pointed at the ambling black-and-white figure and said, “Dodo.”
“Yeah. That’s Dodo.”
Her eyes didn’t leave the video. “Dodo. Nice. Dodo.”
She remembers that I’d always told her, when she eagerly went into the closet to look for Dodo and reached out to pet him, to “Be nice to Dodo. Gentle.” And she was, mostly, except for a couple of times when her eagerness made her motions a bit more abrupt. Dodo would make a little gurgling sound and back away from her a bit. She loved him and would follow, bridging the physical and emotional space Dodo placed between them by leaning her face into Dodo’s fur. “Soft Dodo, nice Dodo. Be gentle with Dodo.”

We participated in a community garage sale today because Mr. W was eager to get rid of the bulky items since our house has very little storage space. He put out Allie’s rain forest Exersaucer, Pooh activity walker, Dodo’s three-tiered cat tree condo, Dodo’s large carrying case. Also his daily ceramic food and water bowls, and our traveling feeders that auto-dispense a gallon of water and food as needed. They all went. The lady who bought the cat tree ($5), a brand-new wool-lined cozy cat bed thingie ($2), and his cute daily food and water bowls ($.50 each) got them for a cat she was going to babysit for a week as the cat’s owners go on vacation. I thought it was very sweet she wanted to have her own cat things for a visiting cat. Personally, I’m still torn between moving on by passing Dodo’s things on to where they’d be more useful (I’ve already donated his special prescription foods and his leftover meds to the vet for other animals they are treating), and feeling guilty for so unceremoniously getting rid of his personal things as if he never existed. And a feeling of being a shitty mother inevitably and immediately follows the occasional feelings of relief when I’m running late or have a lot of things to do and realize that not having to medicate Dodo at the moment saves me 20 minutes.