Tonstant Weader Admits the Wisdom of This:

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. — AA Milne

I don't know if this falls into the category of disorderly, or just weird, but here goes: this out-of-focus* plastic acorn (it is recognizable as an acorn, right?) began life at the end of a pull-string on a defunct baby music box that belonged to my mother, and then to me, and then to not-so-little-R. (Amusing aside: by the time R. was a baby pullstrings were three inches long if they existed at all, and they did not terminate in exquisitely chokable acorns).

For a while I kept the music box and the acorn around, hoping to reattach them, but there's only a hole in one end of the acorn, hence a knot big enough to keep the string in will not in fact admit the string. I must have tossed the music box at some point, but--and here's where the weirdness comes in--I kept the acorn because I liked it. Periodically I come across it in a little bowl or bag of luggage keys, safety pins, marbles, Bionicle joints, etc. and then it rolls away again.

Wednesday after school M. told me for show-and-tell on Friday she had to bring in either a squirrel or an acorn.** I knew there was a Happy Meal Beanie Baby squirrel somewhere in S.'s desk drawer, but didn't feel strong enough to go digging. I figured we would just turn to Google Image this morning. But I woke up in the middle of the night thinking, "Plastic acorn! In the drawer of the hanging whatnot thing in the master bedroom alcove!" And sure enough, there it was. I instructed M. to "tell" that this acorn was handed down from her grandmother, but I don't think it sank in.

*Progress on the camera front: if I plug it in on the camera function, the screen reads "PC Camera" and it won't let me do anything. If I plug it in on the picture management function, the screen reads "MSDC" and I can do all sorts of things. It really, really sucks, though, which for $30 I guess I expected.

**M. is the show-and-tell child we all dream of: she has reminded me of this about 50,000 times, and always at a relatively appropriate moment.