Evelyn's "Baby"

As most of you already know Evelyn has this doll that she absolutely adores. She got it almost a year ago for her first birthday from her Waite grandparents. Her doll means everything to her. She will not do anything or go anywhere without it. It's practically impossible to even "forget" the doll on the way out the door because the second her little rear hits the car seat she calls out for it. She calls her doll "Baby". Evelyn and her baby are inseparable. Part of me thinks that I really shouldn't encourage the bond as much as I do but on the other hand another bigger part of me can't help but see it as sweet and endearing. She treats the baby as if it were her real live baby. She pretends to feed the baby, she puts the baby down for naps, she sits her baby on the potty and she kisses and hugs her all day long. The baby now even has her own seat at the dinner table! She is practically a member of the family. To get to the point of this story, as adorable as all of this may sound there is one huge drawback. Her poor doll has gone through the ringer. An entire year of being carried around (by the hair) by a 1 year old sticky fingered little girl can make a doll pretty disgusting. We contemplated throwing it away and just making this our opportunity to break her of it but we decided that we just couldn't do that to our little girl so we came up with a solution. We decided to replace her doll with none other than the exact same doll (brand new of course). Andy ordered one on ebay and today we made The Switch. We took the old one away and told Evelyn that we were going to give her a bath and make her all clean. I kept her distracted for a few minutes while Andy retrieved the new one and then we just flat out gave it to her. She was totally excited. It was obvious that she could tell that it was her doll but that something was very different about her. The little light on her old one broke probably about 6 months back and I'm actually not even sure if she remembers that it used to light up so Evelyn now loves the fact the she can press her tummy and her little light turns on. It was so cute watching her get excited about it all over again. She kept touching her little braids which, as you can tell in the pictures, her baby hasn't had in a very long time. It was definitely a successful switch. Evelyn now has a clean brand new version of the real thing and she'll never know the wiser.