Oh, Blankie

Now that we've busted out the cross-dressing photos, and admitted our secret crushes, I thought it would be nice to go back to a simpler, more innocent time, when our biggest obsession...

... was our blankies.

Donny prefered the two-finger blankie position. This is how he developed his underbite, by the way. Read more about Donny's teeth here.

Our family has always been partial to crochet blankets in particular. This one is similar to my own blankie, which was a pastel multi-color mix.

Kathleen chose to suck on her thumb through a hole in her blankie, thus killing two birds with one stone. She could carry it with her, securely affixed to her face basically, and self-soothe at the same time.

Kathleen called her yellow and white (translation: dirt and dirt) colored blankie, "Babu." Of the three of us, she was definitely the most obsessed with her blanket. Babu was pretty big and since Kathleen dragged it with her everywhere for the first four years of her life (hence, the dirt and dirt coloration), my mom was finally fed up and seized by the brilliant idea to cut a 1ft by 1ft square out of the blankie, give the mini-me version of Babu to Kathleen to carry around, and discard the rest.

You would have thought our mom had amputated one of Kathleen's limbs. A hysterical Kathleen promptly scavanged the large L-shaped (and frankly depressing) remnant of Babu, wiped her tears on it, and then continued to then drag around both pieces with her everywhere.

Her outrage is still simmering just under the surface as she continues to this day to bring up the Babu-mutilation incident at family gatherings or whenever she wants to get a rise out of our mom, like when we're driving to an afternoon movie, let's say.

On a side note, the other way Kathleen likes to get a rise out of our mom on the way to the movies (which really isn't an easy thing to do, since our mom's so easy-going) is to pretend like she's giving birth in the car – feet flung onto both far corners of the front dashboard, full on groaning and moaning, and then when the little invisible baby emerges, she starts cooing and cradling it.

So since I actually have real babies, they, too have inherited the appreciation for a fine blankie.

There is nothing like sticking your nose in a blankie. Even if it smells bad, it still smells like the best thing in the world.

This is Charlie's, a little green and yellow number I picked up at a garage sale. The picture above that is actually from a commercial shoot for one of my favorite television spots I produced a few years back. I think that shot actually ended up as a huge billboard for a while.

I admit, even as an adult I still have a favorite blankie. Crochet of course. This was also a garage sale find, and now my favorite TV blanket.

Sometimes I like to drape it on the back of my couch and channel what I think is the most iconic TV couch (aside from perhaps from The Simpsons sofa) the blanketed living room couch from Rosanne. Classic.