It really all worked out fine, and could even be seen as an inoculation against sliding further down the slippery slope of turning our entire house into a large den for a pack of seven or eight dogs. Two dogs has been pushing our limits at certain times. Three dogs was tolerable for a weekend but absolutely untenable in the long term. We probably already knew that, but it doesn’t hurt to be confronted with living proof. The major concern, then, was that our little guy would get attached to the new temporary Cavalier boarder just as he immediately bonded with our own Cavalier, and be crushed when the temporary arrangement came to an end.
At this point I will break longstanding blog protocol and give the guest-dog’s actual name, which is Beaux. Middle name Jangles. I bring this up partly because it plays into the story I’m telling. And partly because … First name Beaux, middle name Jangles. Come on.
Anyway, I got the little guy home from day care yesterday and he started getting a little fussy about getting out of the car. Nor was it immediately clear to me whether he was disappointed that we were home already and weren’t going to be driving around looking for choo-choos and big trucks any more that particular afternoon, or whether he simply objected to the manner in which I was helping him out of the backseat and needed to climb back in so that he could climb back out the right way. My recourse was to retrieve from under the passenger seat a slightly crumpled piece of foam headgear which is a yellow toy construction hat. And in that hilariously random way in which two-year-olds are capable of being distracted, my little guy was much happier with the construction hat on his head and immediately acquiesced to exiting the car and heading from the garage into the house.
Once we were in the house, sure enough, the first thing the little guy said was “where’s bo-bo?” which of course was his name for Beaux. We had been keeping Beaux’s crate just inside the garage door, so its absence was immediately apparent. I reminded the little guy that Beaux was only visiting, told him that now he was back with his own family (my wife had taken Beaux to work that day so the owners could retrieve him), and maybe we’d see him again some time. And we moved on, fairly well … or so I thought.
A little while later as I was trying to get dinner together, the little guy got my attention and pointed to his head. “Bye-bye bo-bo hat?” he asked. This struck me as fairly odd, that he would grasp that Beaux was gone and that we had said goodbye to our guest, and that somehow he would connect this to a construction hat. But I tried to roll with it and said, “Yeah, Beaux’s back home with his family. But, your hat is … pretty cool?” “Bye-bye bo-bo hat!” my son repeated. And we went back and forth a few times until I finally realized that the actual sounds “bah buh boo buh hat” were not in fact connecting Beaux the Cavalier’s departure with haberdashery, but rather that the little guy was saying “Bob the Builder Hat!”

Which, you know, yeah, totally. The little guy really wasn’t fazed by the 33% reduction in dogs in the house. Once again a little overthinking and a little projection go a long way in thwarting the translation of two-year-old-speak.
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