This is Pooh. Pooh was the shit from 0 to about 6 years old. I have a couple of favourites, but Pooh is right up there. As you can see, he's worn to the cloth from being dragged all over hell's half acre. He has been washed more times that I can count. He had a shirt once, but we'll get to that in a second. He's a fixture in most of my baby/toddler photos. He's been on car trips, on planes, to the Carribean, across the US and back again.

I was talking to Murphy this weekend http://murphy.fotopages.com. She's still pissed at me about the time I got her kid, Mr. Bobo, a fish for Christmas which in turn gave birth to about 700 more fish. I told her she should start giving them away. She said she couldn't do that because it would scar Mr. Bobo.

For some reason it reminded me about this one time that my mom and I were crossing the border into the US on a car trip to Florida and the US Customs agent - a woman, by the way - took Pooh and tore him open on his back seam to check for drugs that my mother might be smuggling (for no apparent reason other than perhaps being by herself, driving a sports car, and being the original MLF - get where this is going?), right in front of my 3 year old eyes. I told Murphy about that and then she got real quiet and then had to go.

And even if my mom was into that - which she most certainly is not - she would never have sewn it in my favourite bear. She'd have gotten me to hoop it.