A Snakey Story

Isaac had been playing the past couple of days with a wooden snake that his cousins had brought from Grandma Lee in January. He had become quite attached to "Snakey". Snakey even had many babies named blacky, redy, whitey and the like. Things were going fine until Isaac brought Snakey in to me almost split in half. We called Grandma Lee and broke the sad news to her and asked if she could find another one. So I taped him and Isaac seemed ok until Seth pulled it apart. Then the drama began. He brought me to the snake and told me that "Snakey died on the cross." (He had taped the snake to a telephone pole from his train set.)

Then came the tears. Oh, the tears! He can turn them on like water works. At first it was a whiney cry like the "broken toy" level of sadness. It then turned into the most melancholy, sad cry as though he had lost a life-long friend. He was really grieving! Then I heard him pray and ask Heavenly Father to fix Snakey. I was a little worried, but he didn't check to see if he was whole again. Whew! THEN he gets on the piano and starts slowly playing one note at a time for about a minute. (The only other time he's really played the piano was last year when he played a sad song and with tears streaming down his face, he sang-ish "Gramma Lee's gone, gramma Lee's gone". Both of these video files are too big for me to post for now, hopefully I'll figure out how to post them!) After hours of crying and in an effort to ease the pain, we went looking ourselves for a snake. I spotted this rattle snake that is longer than Isaac at a thrift store. I was worried it might be hard to find another wooden snake, but he seems quite taken with this one. He even named it after Snakey! (Wouldn't you think such a creative boy could come up with a better name than Snakey!) By the look on his face, you would never have believed he was so sad just a few hours ago!

As you can see below, he loves Snakey very much and is taking good care of him.