phil

This is Eleanor holding Phil, the baby that lives in the yard. Sophia and I found Phil this summer in one of the "free" boxes on the side of the road that people leave all over East Vancouver. I did take another picture of Baby Phil but seem to have lost it, which is sad, because what you can't see from the photo above is that Phil is missing his left leg, and is um... anatomically correct. In fact he is VERY anatomically correct. This seems not to have phased my children at all.

Why someone would ever make a doll this ugly is a mystery to me. I think these "realistic newborn" dolls are made to give to big brothers or sisters to try and get them to be sympathetic when their parents bring a new baby home. A lot of newborns are pretty ugly, but few as ugly as Baby Phil. (Eleanor may be hiding his face just to protect his feelings from all of you judgmental types out there in blog-land.) Perhaps the goal of the doll is to create a feeling of superiority in children, that their new baby sibling may be a pain in the butt, but hey, he's not as ugly as the doll.

Eleanor likes to draw on Baby Phil with chalk. We are not sure why she does this, but it has caused Phil to have an almost "Lord of the Files" kind of vibe about him now, what with the missing leg and the chalk markings, not to mention the random leaking he does from the hole where the missing leg should go when he gets left in the wading pool.

When we first brought the doll home, Sophia wanted to call it "Nori" but we kept telling her that would be confusing, since that is Eleanor's nickname. (Though as I type, that logic seems faulty now - I don't think confusing Eleanor with the doll was ever a real issue.) But Wade and I thought it was so funny to call the baby Phil, because, well, we've got a good friend named Phil, and it was just funny to us. It did stick eventually though, because after Baby Phil had been around a while this summer, we had a random conversation about what we should name a baby boy (a real one) if we ever had one and Sophia said, "You should call him Nori. Or you could call him Phil."

Sorry real Phil. After the doll, the name is probably out of the running.