Todd's Stories #5

All children have something special that they love. Some children have a blanket that they cannot sleep without. Some children have a binky which they suck on to fall asleep. Some children need their favorite nightlight plugged-in to comfort them to bed. I needed get-its.

At this point you may be wondering what a "get-it" is. Well, continue reading to find out.

When I was a young child of the age of about 2 I had a rocking horse. This rocking horse, like all rocking horses, had hair on it's rear-end to signify a tail. Well, my rocking horse had particularly soft tail-hair. I would roll the hair up into a little ball and rub it in between my fingers and on my cheek. With that soft rocking horse tail-hair in my hand there were no troubles in the world, I would fall right asleep.

From my crib I could see the rocking horse. I would reach my little arms out as far as they could reach and yet I could not reach that hair. Oh how I yearned for that tail-hair. My mother figured out that I was trying to get it, it being the tail-hair, and would cut off pieces of the hair and give them to me so that I could once again roll them up into a ball. Hence, these pieces of hair which I was trying to get became known as get-its.

Over time my rocking horse lost all of it's tail-hair. The story of the get-it does not end there though. To keep little Todd happy, my mother bought me cotton balls as a replacement to the tail-hair. These would soon be known as "bagged get-its" since they were in a bag and were my new get-its. For many a year these bagged get-its gave me the comfort I needed, not only in my crib but wherever I traveled. They were my blanky, my binky. They were the constant in my life which allowed me to become the great person I am today.

A side note of sorts, one year for Christmas my sister gathered up all the lint in the dryer machine and gave it to me as a new type of get-it. This get-it does not have it's own surname, but it certainly was wonderful.

The moral of the story is that children need something to comfort them in their younger years to help them feel safe and that my sister used to give really cheap (aka gifts that cost her nothing) Christmas presents.