Anyone who's ever had a pet knows they have their own little quirks and personalities. Some of you may have had conversations with your pets - little back and forth conversations you hold in your normal voice, and in the voice that you imagine your pet would speak with if they had vocal cords.
Of course, Jason and I had a Baldur voice. And a lot of times it was used to say things like, "You guys are the worst." (Particularly after we had just sung a particularly egregious song about him that we had just made up.)
We would also sometimes blame things on Baldur - things that obviously could not have been done by him, due to being about 2 feet tall and having no thumbs. Ascribing blame to Baldur was usually followed by, "Oh my god, you guys, you KNOW I can't reach that" (or just, "No, Dad!") in the Baldur Voice.
Recently, we have started blaming things on Baldur's ghost.
Something will go missing and if we can't find it, we'll just shrug and say, "well, I guess Baldur took it," or turn to Athena and say, "well, little girl, your brother stole the such-and-such again." It started out as a joke with the scissors.
I think the first Christmas we had Baldur, I had been wrapping presents, and went out, leaving the scissors on the coffee table - forgetting that we had a coffee-table-height dog. I came back home and was greeted by my happy boy with his tail wiggling, very proud of the new toy he had clutched in his teeth; he had the scissors gripped very precisely by the plastic thumb loop. Obviously, after that, Jason and I were very careful to leave the scissors on the counter or higher tables.
A couple weeks after Baldur died, we couldn't find the scissors we keep on the counter in the kitchen. We shrugged, suggested Baldur's ghost had taken them, and had a good laugh about it when we found them a couple days later exactly where Jason had left them in another room.
A week or two after that, they went missing again. We could not find them. We'd been doing a lot of cleaning, moving, getting rid of stuff, and breaking down boxes getting the house ready for the baby. We finally just assumed the scissors had been put down between two stacks of recyclables (we were using them a lot for the box breaking down) and had accidentally gotten thrown away. We bought a new pair of scissors for the kitchen.
This past Monday, I was sick. Our little Chinese restaurant is kind of our go to when we feel bad, for their egg drop soup and (surprisingly light) chicken fried rice. Jason went to the kitchen to look at the take out menu, to confirm that they're only open Tuesday through Sunday. He came back into the room with an odd look on his face and handed me the unexpectedly heavy paper menu. Inside it were the lost scissors. The last time we got takeout from them was the day Baldur died. We laughed. I think we may have cried a little, too.
I'm not saying that we really think that Baldur stole the scissors and hid them in the menu. But it is sometimes comforting to think that our playful, goofy boy is still hanging around, playing jokes on us, now that he doesn't have gravity to confine him to coffee table height.