A Problem with Primates

Ahhhh, the end of the school year is here and Chloe is enjoying her last few days of elementary school. Next year she'll be in middle school with Connor, but for now, she's enjoying the fanfare the comes with the glorious long-awaited end-of-the-year grade school wind down: School Parties.

Today she and her head of three precariously perched ponytails bounded off to school for "Crazy Hair Day" and she's got all sorts of plans for tomorrow's "Backwards Day" but it was last Friday that really got me shaking my head. Friday was "Pajama Day", basically a day the kids all get outta bed and just head strait off to school. But everyone knows that there is one all-important tag along item on Pajama Day: the stuffed animal. Each year the kids show up in PJ's and slippers and clean out their backpacks to make room to bring along their favorite stuffed animal.

The first year Chloe got to do this she shrewdly asked her teacher what exactly qualifies under the term "stuffed animal" to which the teacher, falling into Chloe's baited trap answered, "whatever stuffed animal you like to carry around with you."

Bad answer.

This girl might be one of the smallest kids in the class but she is very capable and extremely willing to  carry around the mother of all stuffed animals. One that, for most of Chloe's life, was bigger than she was. Her preposterous penchant, yes indeed, was that little ol' Chloe loves her giant sliverback Gorilla.

Yes, alarming I know.

And especially nefarious since the one and only fear that I have had since childhood is an irrational fear of gorillas. In life's classic list of scary things, it is the Gorilla that has the dubious distinction as being my Achilles heal. The Boogieman, spiders and snakes, dark alleys, jumping from airplanes, you name it, I am not afraid. But show me a Gorilla and I will scream like a girl.

In a bizzare twist of fate that happened to me around the tender age of two, I have a distinct memory of being assaulted by, of all things, a Gorilla. Years later I would discover it was indeed not a real Gorilla at all but a prankster neighbor who happened to work for a Hollywood Studio in their Costume Department. And through some sort of not-so-funny ruse, this neighbor and my father concocted a plan whereby "costume boy", who'd taken a full-fledged gorilla suit home from work, would swing by our house on his way to a Halloween party and scare the living daylights out of my mother by ringing the bell and then going all-out berserk once she opened the door for what she thought would be just a gaggle of harmless little trick-or-treaters. Unfortunately when that fateful ring happened, it was more trick than treat: I was the one who answered the door.

Flash forward to the wretched scene where you find my two year old body curled up into the fetal position and screaming bloody murder and you have discovered the origin of my life long irrational fear of Gorillas.

This is a picture of me just one year later...

Yes, my parents, knowing my profound displeasure for hairy beasts, thought it'd be a real hoot to take my photo next to the Gorilla statue at the San Diego Zoo. As you can tell by the matching expressions on both my face and the Gorilla's, neither of us thought the idea was all that funny. That was the last day I ever had anything to do with Gorillas or monkeys. To this very day I've never even watched the Wizard of Oz in it's entirety. Once the flying monkeys come out, I get the heebeejeebees and flee the room. I've sworn off ALL hairy beasts-which includes a stern warning to my husband to never let his back get hairy!

Admittedly, if you're going to have an irrational fear of anything, Gorillas would be a good choice. I rarely run into them-which is to say NEVER. I am very careful at the zoo staying far far away from any anthropoid areas and that seems to be the only place that poses a primate problem.

That was until Chloe came along.

This dangable girl, for reasons unexplainable, zeroed in on the whole of the primates and decided that her favorite thing in the whole wide world was monkeys and gorillas. Over the years she has amassed a whole collection of them in stuffed animal form.

But the one she loves the most is a giant four-foot tall silverback gorilla. She's had it since she was little and spent most of her napping and book reading hours engulfed in it's arms. Tender, yet hairy isn't it?

And ever since she tricked her very first elementary school teacher into letting her bring it to Pajama Day, she has lugged the hairy beast to PJ Day every single year since. This year was no exception. When I drove to school to pick her up she wasn't all that hard to spot in the mass of school children waiting on the curb. I drove past all the kids with the cute little bears and bunnies and doggies and headed strait for the kid overshadowed by her beady-eyed thug.

As I got home I was thrilled at the notion that there would be no more stuffed animal-toting PJ parties for Chloe at the Middle School next year. And I grinned an evil smirk knowing the Gorillas Days would soon be numbered. Chloe would soon be distracted by other things and grow too old for hairy beasts and I would soon be rid of the thing.

Then I discovered Chloe has other plans. Devious ones. She has decided to woo another generation into her monkey madness. I came into the living room yesterday and saw this horrible scene:

She had swaddled her little niece Kendra into its arms!

 Then she propped a baby bottle 

into the beast's hairy hand and let King Kong feed her!

 Then, to my horror,

my own grandchild tenderly fell asleep in its arms!

Seriously folks, I HATE GORILLAS. Can't a girl just have her little irrational fear without provocation?