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Some of you may remember Sam Winchester, the life-size tiger stuffed animal that Kaylee inherited and then came to love a little over a year ago.

Well, I’m an asshole, and I donated Sam to Goodwill about a month ago.  In our old house, Sam could sit up on a plant shelf in Kaylee’s room, totally out of the way.  He gave the illusion that he was watching over my daughter, and plus, who doesn’t like tigers?  But once we moved, there was no convenient place to put him anymore.  We eventually just dropped him in the middle of Kaylee’s bedroom floor and left him there, free to ambush us when we came to check on her in the middle of the night.  It was not a good spot for a tiger.

So one day in January, I left the kids with my parents and I sorted through Kaylee’s toys looking for things to donate.  Mostly I stuck with toys she doesn’t play with, but Sam was the big exception.  I just knew she was going to throw a fit when she saw that he was gone, but I couldn’t stand having him around anymore either.

But then the weirdest thing happened.  Kaylee came home from Gram and Papa’s house, and she didn’t say a thing when she went into her newly Sam-less room.  And she continued to not notice, to the point that I thought I’d totally gotten away with it.

Until, of course, this morning.

Out of nowhere, Kaylee came into our room first thing this morning and said, “Where’s my big tiger?”

Both Rob and I paused for a long time, not saying anything.  Maybe she’ll just drop the subject, I thought.  But she persisted.

I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly, being that it was the crack of 8:30, but I said, “Your tiger went to live at the zoo.”

Hey, it sounded much better than, “Mommy gave your tiger away when you weren’t looking.”

But what I wasn’t considering was this: Kaylee gets to go to the zoo all the time.  We have a family membership, so the zoo is like her second home in the summertime.  Naturally, she thinks we’ll be able to visit Sam whenever we want.

So she said, “Oh, let’s go to the zoo!  We’ll feed the giraffes and get my tiger!”

Advice to other parents in the same situation: The tiger went to live IN THE JUNGLE.

Again, we thought that we could just let it go and she’d forget about it.  She gets all sorts of crazy ideas in her head all the time, so she wouldn’t be too sad if this one didn’t come to pass.  So our strategy for the morning was to make no sudden movements, and make no mention of the tiger.

This worked fairly well for a while.  It seemed to slip her mind, and she happily busied herself eating breakfast and watching Sesame Street.

Every morning before Rob leaves for work, he makes sure to give Kaylee a hug and a kiss, and this morning required him to kneel down in front of the TV, where Kaylee was studying Elmo and Abby’s knight costumes.  By this time, we believed we were in the clear.

Suddenly, with no warning, Jake Jabs appeared on the television screen, sitting next to a real live tiger.  “Tiger!” Kaylee shouted.  Then the screen showed a child sitting next to the same goddamn stuffed tiger that I just gave away.  “It’s my tiger!  We can go to the store and get him!  And we’ll get my bed with the pink ladder!”

Jake Jabs is officially on my shit list.  Especially because I couldn’t figure out how he managed to use his evil powers to infiltrate Sesame Street, which is usually aired without commercials.  (It turns out Kaylee must have hit a button on the cable box and changed the channel.  That, or Jake Jabs did it with his mind.)

I have a long summer ahead of me.