First Blog Post!

The Order of the Beanie

Hi guys!

Welcome to my first blog post. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, and what better time to start than immediately post grad while the existential dread slowly drips in, but you feel this weird freedom to try new things and explore your passions (post grad blog post reflection to come).

Anyway,

I was looking through my mom’s Facebook account and found some old pictures including the one in the header. It got me thinking about a children’s play and how it weaves itself in to the rest of their life. How the partners we choose to play with as a child mold and change how we see the world and ourselves.

I used to line up my Beanie Babies and have assembly with my friend and neighbor Olivia. I had written down each one of our Beanie Babies names in a composition book (with an indication of who its owner was, of course) and read it out while we put them in a specific, arbitrary yet sacred, order. I remember a cat called Amber was first. By the time this whole process was over (Olivia and I both had quite the collection), she would 8 times out of 10 be like “ok, I’m gonna go home now”. Sometimes we wouldn’t even get to the part where we would “play” Beanie Babies. I loved the “Order of the Beanie” (name of beanie baby assembly we created) though so it was kind of chill with me when we didn’t get to the actual game. I wonder if Olivia enjoyed it as much as I did. We had so many phases together as kids. Beanie Babies, Littlest Pet Shop, Zoo Zoo Pets, Video Star, guinea pigs (LOL), etc. Besides my sister Abby, she truly was one of my first partners in creativity. And she’s so super creative. It’s so funny because I feel like not a lot of people know that about her. She is such a good drawer. But every time I tell her that she says “Laura, I am just a good tracer”. BULLSHIT. Bullshit, Olivia. Accept the fact that you have god given artistic gifts. She loves being creative. We would sing together all the time growing up. She was the boy parts and I was the girl parts. I was Pink in “Just Give Me A Reason” and she was (insert whoever sang the boy part here). She was the lead singer in the band we were in with our other friend Katie called “the good girls band”. She wrote songs. One was about a squirrel having a seizure on a cruise ship. Super random. Super funny. If I ever brought up how much the both of us loved making music videos growing up she’d say, “no YOU love making music videos” and then in the same breath suggest some awesome shot idea for the next “project” we were working on. We made the end of the year neighborhood recap videos together. She does everything she loves so thoughtfully. We both love the same kinds of books. We share copies of the same ones to send notes back and forth like a secret code. Anytime I see her trademark yellow highlights in “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle I know exactly what she was thinking when she marked it. I can hear it in her voice. The same voice that used to make up Beanie Babie story lines & yell at our younger sisters across the house to make us sandwiches. The same voice that called me when she got the sense I wasn’t doing well in college. She is so distinct. So predictable. So reliable. She gets me in a way no one else does. I let her read this before I posted and she said “yeah I didn’t enjoy the beanie babie assembly as much as you did, but I just let you have your moment” and I think she genuinely thinks this, but she’s wrong. Because somewhere inside her too, I can sense it, is a deep desire to organize and make sense of what she has, just like the one in me. That’s what made us such great play partners. That’s what makes us such great life partners.

-lrn