Attack of the clones

Linus had his blanket; Calvin his tiger. Samson has lovey lamb. It's kind of a small white blanket with a lamb's head, which sounds weird and vaguely pagan, but it's the one thing needful to settle young Samson down.

Known in our house as "LL" or "La-La" (Samson's preferred term), this little lamb is the sine qua non of bedtime, naptime, and times of stress.

In good times, La-La gets ditched like yesterday's paper in favor of trucks, cars, cookies, the cat, and just about anything else that moves, rolls, crunches, or purrs.

But when the chips are down, it's La-La time.

At the recommendation of several friends, we realized that having only one La-La brought forth the very real possibility of a crisis should said lamb go missing. Unfortunately, the store we bought La-La in was out of stock. Not to fear, however, because Vicki is a champion web researcher and promptly had not one but two La-Las en route to our house.

And not a moment too soon, because La-La number 1 is looking pretty rough. It's actually crunchy in parts, and while it seems like it would be easy to remember to simply throw it into the wash, we only seem to remember its general nastiness just as he's reaching for it for comfort.

In any event, La-Las 2 and 3 arrived the other day, and I expected a scene similar to what his friend Oliver experienced upon seeing his ducky in duplicate. It was, as his Dad (official legal counsel of dada and all-around good guy) explained, nothing less than a rending in the time-space continuum.

Samson was far less Philip K. Dick about it; he grabbed all three in some kind of La-La bacchanal, but then segregated the clones from the original and went on his merry way.

That Vicki and I actually had a conversation last night about a plot to integrate one of the new La-Las into the rotation should give anyone without children some small insight into how things change with their arrival. Which is not to say that before Samson we would have been discussing the relative merits of European-style progressive socialism over the more market-oriented U.S. system of governance, but we would probably would not have had a 20-minute confab about cloth lamb clones while doing the dishes.