It probably says a lot about me that, rather than a teddy bear, my beloved stuffed animal as a child was a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“Do you want a teddy, sweetie?” -My mother 27 years ago.
“T-REX!”-My 2 year old self.
“A…T-Rex?”- My mildly confused mother.
“T REX T REX T REX.” -my stubborn 2 year old ass, who’d been watching dinosaur documentaries taped off of PBS on repeat for six months straight.
“Okay.” -My resigned mother.
She then proceeded to make one because of fucking course they don’t have stuffed T Rexes at Target.
I got him for Christmas. I named him T-Rex. I love him. He went everywhere with me. I threatened people I didn’t like by saying I would feed them to T-rex. He sits on my vanity now as a protector. I’ve carefully patched him a couple times with the leftover fabric from when Mom made him; she bought extra and saved it because she is a wise woman and Knew.
“Why does your daughter have a stuffed dinosaur. Wouldn’t you like a nice doll or bear more?” -many, many people throughout my childhood.
“Why’s playing with a stuffed bear better than a T rex. They’re both apex predators.” -My mother.
“What.”-those same befuddled people.
It was from this pattern.
Mom still has it because she has never thrown a sewing pattern away in her life.
God, this reminds me of when I took my daughter to the Natural History Museum for the first time after she fell in love with Walking With Dinosaurs. I was fully prepared to buy her a cuddly dinosaur. But that was not what she wanted. She wanted the 12″ plastic realistic T-Rex with blood smeared around its mouth. Later on, she also acquired a chunk of Amethyst, and spent most of the rest of the trip hitting him on the head with it because it was the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs.
if it happened at all, it happened like that 