Parent life / A weekend in Australia, 2009
The Class Bear's Scrapbook Had a Winery and Singapore
In 2009 an Australian father brought home his daughter's Grade 1 bear for the weekend, opened its scrapbook, and saw what the other families had done.
In November 2009 Joseph Kelly wrote in his parenting column for the Australian site Essential Baby that he had just had a weekend in which he ran at breakneck speed from Friday to Sunday, "all because of a stuffed toy bear."
The bear was Barnaby, the Grade 1 mascot at his daughter's school. Each weekend one child took Barnaby home and recorded his weekend in a scrapbook. Barnaby, Kelly reported, had rock-star status: on the walk home from school they were stopped several times by well-wishers who wanted a minute with him.
At home, Kelly opened the scrapbook expecting shots of Barnaby with somebody's dog. There were some. There were also shots of Barnaby on his first ski run of the season, sampling the reds at an interstate winery, and dining on mud crab in Singapore's market district. It was clear, Kelly wrote, "that if we wanted to impress Barnaby over the weekend we needed to bring our A-game."
The bear had been skiing, wine-tasting and eating mud crab in Singapore. Our class bear, when the youngest brought him home last year, got as far as the fruit bowl.
Saturday: Kelly built a makeshift papoose so Barnaby could ride strapped to his daughter's chest. Her little sister immediately requested up to half a dozen of her own toys strapped to hers. Then a three-hour photo shoot at an indoor play center: Barnaby on the slide, Barnaby flying a toy helicopter, Barnaby eating chips with sauce.
Sunday: the zoo, to bring Barnaby closer to his kin. Barnaby fleeing tigers, chatting with monkeys, sitting in the jaws of a life-size hippo statue. Then they had to bolt from the zoo to get the hundred-odd photos developed before closing time.
And then the real work. After the children and the bear were in bed, Kelly and his wife stayed up past midnight "workshopping storylines." They settled on a narrative: Barnaby searching for his true home, down slides, across the countryside by helicopter, asking tigers for directions, and finding at last that he was home all along, nestled next to a sleeping child. Three pages of A3 paper. A dozen photos.
Workshopping storylines. Two adults, after midnight, giving a bear a character arc. I have done exactly this, with a diorama, and I would like to say I stopped at three pages.
On Monday morning, Kelly wrote, all he could think was how grateful he was that Barnaby visited only once a year. "Entertaining stuffed bears is tough work."
Our bear came back for a second visit this spring. I asked the youngest what she wanted to do with him. She said nothing, he was tired. She put him on the couch next to the dog and they watched television for two days. Her entry in the scrapbook said, in full, "He rested." It was the best entry in the book. I know, because I had drafted three pages, with a helicopter.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- Joseph Kelly: Weekend with Barnaby (Essential Baby, November3 2009) web.archive.org
- eParenting: What To Do When The Class Teddy Comes Home eparenting.co.uk
- SN Social Sciences: Mothers constructing six-year-olds doi.org
- PHE America: Take Home Activity Journals pheamerica.org