Post #42: Where’s Oo-oo? A Monkey Soother Saga
- Nana Beryl Jupiter
- Jun 1, 2023
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 14, 2023
So I hope you haven’t lost sleep worrying over missing Oo-oo, aka Oo lala in France, which was where Nana ended Blog post #41 about our family trip in November, 2022. But you’ll have to wait just a bit longer to find out if he was found, while I tell you more about the family history of Oo-oo, and his beloved predecessor Ee-ee. It was a dependency founded on love as you will see illustrated by the extensive photo history of Cooper with his soother blanket monkey in countless infant and childhood situations.
Nana was familiar with the soft dependency scenario as both her young children became attached to their baby blankets, often self-soothing themselves as they held a blanket to their face and sucked a thumb. Stacy’s yellow blanket became known as Noonie, because she would carry/drag it around the house chanting something like “noon-a-noonie, noonie, noon,” which was a refrain from a song on her favorite television show Sesame Street.
That reminds me of two more Stacy stories, which I am going to digress from the soother toy history to tell you. Stacy adored Sesame Street but started life in the mid-70’s when you watched shows on television when they were broadcast in real time, pre-VCR’s and other future recording devices. So we were always aware when Sesame Street was scheduled and turned on the television for its specific viewing time. But toddler Stacy loved it so much that she became hysterical if we were slightly late and she missed the opening song. It often took her a lot more than soothing Noonie to calm her down.
Unfortunately, Noonie was the culprit in a bloody Stacy accident, or maybe it was Mom Beryl’s fault. Dr. Jesse had warned me about the potential child hazard of the beveled glass-topped cocktail table in the living room of our small Wellesley house, but I liked its attractive design with a wooden, snail-like base and kept the table anyway. During Thanksgiving weekend three year-old Stacy wandered into the living room holding Noonie. She tripped on her blanket, falling onto the glass table top, and cutting herself just above the chin. Worrying about scarring on our pretty young daughter, we took her to Mass General Hospital where Jesse was an orthopaedic resident, to be seen by his plastic surgeon colleague Dr. Jim May. Jim agreed to stitch her up but was busy until later in the day. To kill time, we spent a couple hours at the New England Aquarium. Hmmm … might that be when Stacy’s love of marine biology began?
Meanwhile, the potentially hazardous table had a long Jupiter family life with no more bloody incidents (of which I am aware): it was moved to the living room then screened porch of our first Weston house, was in basement playroom of our second Weston house, was driven by Ben from Massachusetts to the University of Colorado at Boulder (where he surprisingly kept Windex handy in his apartment for glass cleaning), and upon Ben’s graduation was transferred to Stacy who drove it to Telluride, CO, and eventually to Santa Cruz, California where she studied for her marine biology doctorate.
Benjy’s soothing blue baby blanket was named Mimi, because he would point at the blanket and say “me, me, me,” meaning “give it to me.”
When Benjy was 2 years old and went to daycare at the Jewish Community Center in Louisville, Kentucky, where Jesse trained in hand surgery and I was teaching community college psychology, Benjy needed his soothing blanket with him, especially for rest period. But I was worried that Benjy might get inadvertently separated from his comforting blanket. So I decided to cut off a small piece of the blanket, so little Mimi could remain at day care while big Mimi always stayed home. That strategy worked.
As I wrote in the previous blog post, Stacy and Benjy also had their favorite stuffed toys. Out of her many animals, Stacy favored her little yellow dog the best. As he became very loved like the famed storybook Velveteen rabbit, the little dog “aged” so we named him Old Yeller.
With her love of Old Yeller, Stacy accumulated several other stuffed yellow dogs in her “kennel.” Fortunately, one of the dogs was almost a twin of Old Yeller, which was particularly advantageous when original Old Yeller was lost. That was under dad Jesse’s watch when he brought Stacy with Old Yeller to visit me at the hospital when baby Benjy was born. Old Yeller mysteriously disappeared between the parking lot and the Boston Women’s Hospital, never to be relocated. Thank goodness Old Yeller’s twin was waiting at home to fill in as favorite dog.
So our children had both inseparable blankets and favorite stuffed toys. In the prior blog #41, Nana wrote about the Switzerland escapades of Stacy’s “vieille jaune chien” (old yellow dog) and Benjy’s Sesame Street soft Ernie doll.
But at some time during the long gap between raising our children and our grandson, someone created baby soother toys that combined a small blanket with a cute stuffed animal.
When baby Cooper was six months old, Mom Stacy brought him from their Fiji home to southern California for a work meeting, with plans for Nana and Papa to babysit. Nana wrote all about this in Blog Post #32. We were excited that our relatives, the Abrams family, would also be in Los Angeles on overlapping dates, so they would also get to see Stacy and meet her baby. That’s when Cooper received his first soother blanket monkey, a gift lovingly presented by Aunt Tracy and cousin Sophie.
No one knew or could have imagined at that time how special this toy would become to Cooper. Actually, friends of Nana and Papa had also gifted baby Cooper a soother blanket toy, a blue baby bunny, accompanied by the classic children’s board book “Pat the Bunny.”
And for a while, Cooper did not have a preference for either soother, so Cooper’s parents brought both monkey and bunny many places they went with him. They needed to be vigilant for keeping track of their location, such as being dropped indiscriminately at a playground or innocently picked up by another child. During Cooper’s toddlerhood, Stacy tried to leave the soother toys at home to minimize this developing dependency and potential future catastrophic loss. But when Stacy traveled for meetings, dad Jason did not want to chance his young son’s being additionally distressed by the absence of his favorite comfort toys and always kept both of them close at hand, further cementing Cooper’s attachment to them.
Recognizing how disruptive the loss of either soother toy might be, Stacy ordered both a back-up monkey and bunny to Nana’s house for Nana to bring to Stacy at their next get together. Good idea, as you never know when an oft-accompanying toy might disappear (escape?) while mom is busy attending to an active toddler.
Eventually, Cooper developed a preference for the soother monkey, maybe because Mom Stacy often repeated funny monkey noises: “ee-ee, oo-oo, ah-ah.” And that’s how Cooper’s first soother monkey got his name “Ee-ee.” Of course, the bunny was just as soft and could have been just as soothing, but it wasn’t associated with funny sounds like a monkey. And true to its intention, a self-soothing strategy developed as Cooper held Ee-ee to his face while simultaneously sucking his thumb, creating a readily-available fix for most temporary childhood distresses like being tired, hungry or sad. The main disadvantage, however, was the dependency on Ee-ee, possibly creating more distress if temporarily unavailable or lost.
So did that happen? Of course it did! In March, 2018, Stacy brought then 19 month-old Cooper with her to America to be cared for by Nana and other family assistants while she attended two consecutive meetings organized by her employer Wildlife Conservation Society. Nana and Papa, Stacy and Cooper all arrived in southern Florida, and stayed at the Boca Raton home of the Garts, my sister Carol and husband David, where Stacy quickly taught Nana the basics of then current Cooper care before she left me with her very jet-lagged toddler for her 5-day meeting in northern Florida.
So Cooper and I spent several overnights in the same guest bed, protected with a waterproof sheet since he was still taking a milk bottle to bed with resultant overly wet diapers, while I tried to get him to sleep. More often he was bouncing on the bed way past my bedtime until I banished my vocally protesting grandson to a secure crib for his own safety and my sanity.
And of course, another one of my tasks was keeping track of Ee-ee, whether I took Cooper to the market or to Gumbo Limbo Nature Center with Aunt Carol.
However, after one of my walking excursions to the Gart’s neighborhood playground, I looked down at Cooper in his stroller, noticed he had fallen asleep, but did not see Ee-ee in Cooper’s hand or in the stroller. I did a quick reversal for a couple blocks, and fortunately found Ee-ee on the sidewalk. Phew! So that was not where Ee-ee got irretrievably lost, and not on my watch.
Stacy’s next meeting was the following week at the WCS headquarters at the Bronx Zoo. We left Florida together but separated at West Palm Beach airport.
I returned to my Boston area home to re-group and pick up my car. Stacy and Cooper flew to New York, and initially stayed in Greenwich, CT, with Aunt Tracy and Uncle David Abrams. During her brief time between meetings, Stacy took Cooper by train on a day trip to New York City.
They met her colleague and his toddler daughter at the American Museum of Natural History, but it was so crowded that they took off for Central Park. And somewhere between the museum and the park, original Ee-ee disappeared (maybe to join the Central Park monkeys?). Stacy retraced their steps as best she could but no Ee-ee re-appeared. The saving grace was that Cooper had fallen asleep and stayed asleep until they returned to Greenwich. Once there, Stacy was able to substitute back-up Ee-ee, without young Cooper’s being aware of the monkey switcheroo.
Meanwhile, over the months and years Cooper developed a preference for his monkey soother, becoming increasingly attached to his inseparable buddy Ee-ee. This is well documented in the many photos of Cooper with his soother toys, but mostly the monkey.
When Stacy announced that she was bringing Cooper to our Weston home in November, 2018, I did a lot of advance preparations which I wrote about in Blog Post #6, Getting Ready for Grandson Cooper. As I was shopping for Cooper, I came across a soft monkey toddler chair at Home Goods which I couldn’t resist buying, knowing how much Cooper loved his Ee-ee. The comfy chair was a hit, and we fortunately did not have any frantic Ee-ee disappearances during that visit.
So Ee-ee happily accompanied Cooper all the way back to Fiji, and amazingly stayed with him for quite a while, considering all the places he was taken.
However, we did have a missing Ee-ee episode when Stacy and I took Cooper to Disneyland in April, 2019, chronicled in Blog Post #20, Nana does Disney. And this was during the same trip when I had come to California to spend several days toddler sitting Cooper while Stacy was attending a meeting in Santa Barbara. I kept track of Ee-ee at all times but we did have a distressing situation because Cooper kept burying a newly acquired, tiny plastic shark in the sand, until we eventually could not find it despite how many holes we dug in the vicinity.
So Stacy and I both knew we would have to watch out for Ee-ee at Disneyland due to less than three-year old Cooper’s preference for holding his monkey rather than turning him over to mom for safe-keeping.
But Disney is a busy hectic overwhelming place. As my brother had warned when I told him our Disney plans, “Get ready for the melt-down.” And of course, we had one of those, at the end of day one as hungry and tired collided.
But it was in the middle of day two that the monkey went missing. Stacy and I tore in opposite directions, retracing steps to locate the elusive Ee-ee, whose absence would have created a major catastrophe in advance of their long journey home to Fiji. Luckily, I found the indispensable monkey dangling over a railing and then had to chase across most of Tomorrowland to re-connect with Stacy and announce the incredibly fortunate discovery.
As you can imagine, Ee-ee was so well loved, joined Cooper at meals and dragged around everywhere, that he was often quite dirty and smelly. Nana was not inclined to touch and hold Ee-ee very much, and often reminded Stacy to bathe him. Stacy typically had to sneak Ee-ee away when Cooper was asleep for monkey grooming.
When Cooper was about 3 years old and his Ee-ee fixation was very well cemented, Stacy and Cooper returned home by taxi from visiting friends in the Suva, Fiji vicinity. But Ee-ee never made it out of the taxi. Stacy tried everything imaginable to retrieve Ee-ee but he was never found. Stacy had to convince Cooper to transfer his love and attachment to the spare soother monkey, who they deemed Ee-ee’s brother and named him “Oo-oo” after the successive sounds in monkey speak: “ee-ee, oo-oo, ah-ah.” Stacy convinced Cooper that Ee-ee was traveling the world and might return one day. Meanwhile, another soother monkey was ordered to Nana’s house. So the next time Nana went to Fiji, Nana brought the world traveling monkey back to Cooper. However, by then, Oo-oo had become Cooper’s favored soother monkey and the returning imposter Ee-ee was somewhat welcomed but no longer #1 monkey.
So it was still increasingly aging and deteriorating Oo-oo who traveled to France with Cooper. In fact, as the years went by beloved Oo-oo has had multiple surgeries executed by Dr. Stacy to reconnect the stuffed monkey to his blanket.
Finally, I return you to the monkey-hanger at the end of the previous blog post, #41 about our family trip to France, when Cooper announced he was missing Oo-oo. We were all tightly packed into a rental SUV and about to leave Montpellier, France, where we had been staying for a week while Stacy attended the meeting that was the inspiration for our trip. Stacy last remembered seeing Oo-oo when Cooper was playing in our hotel courtyard amidst our checking out.
Stacy sprinted back to the hotel as Cooper became more anxious in the waiting car. Several minutes later … success! Oo-oo retrieved where he had been turned into reception. Minutes later Cooper was euphorically reunited with Oo-oo, with lots of admonishments about keeping better track of him, and turning him over to his parents or grandparents more often for safekeeping. Indeed, we all vowed that we would be even more vigilant of Oo-oo’s whereabouts for the second half of our European vacation.
Having just read this post, you may be recalling your own experiences with your grandchildren or children with a favorite soother toy, stuffed animal or blanket. I think that a compilation of these stories would make an enjoyable blog post. So please write your memories on this topic and send to me: Beryl@FinallyNana.com.
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