Captain Jelly Belly’s cousins were visiting yesterday, and they brought him a new car, a replica of one of the characters in the movie Cars. He has a whole collection and we’re down now to the more obscure cars — this one was “Bling Bling McQueen,” featuring Lightening McQueen with really fancy wheels and blue paint, who appears onscreen in a dream sequence for about two seconds. He is cool, though.

Anyway, the back of the package has a small picture of many of the cars in the set, so you can check off those you own and see the ones you should be coveting. The Captain loves to pour over these pictures and spends hours pointing out which ones he wants for his next birthday. Which is like, ten months away. It’s good to be prepared, I guess.

So with the Bling Bling package, the Captain’s aunt made the unforeseen, fatal mistake of cutting the package in half — she kept the part with all the little pictures on it for the Captain, but then cut away the rest of the cardboard backing and threw it out. (She’s normally an excellent recycler; I’m not sure why she chose the garbage on this occasion.) When the Captain saw that part of the paper was missing, I could tell he was NOT! HAPPY!, but he held it together.

Today, he comes by with his half-piece of packaging and…

Him: Where is the other half of the paper?
Me: It’s gone in the garbage, honey.
Him: Can I have it now?
Me: Oh sweetie, I’m sorry, but it is gone away. It’s garbage day and they took it with the garbage.
Him: Can we go to the garbage store and get it back?
Me: Sugar pie, there isn’t any garbage store. When they take away our garbage, it goes to a place called the “dump,” and they put it in a big hole, and we can’t get it back.

He goes away to think things over. A few minutes later, he comes back in tears…

Him: Mommy? How deep is the hole at the dump?

I couldn’t tell if he was crying because he figured the hole was too deep to climb into for a rescue attempt, or because he couldn’t bear the thought of his missing piece of paper lying on the ground. And I felt so badly for him, I swear for a fleeting moment I actually considered driving out there and digging through a whole city’s worth of garbage to find a 10 by 5 centimeter rectangle of cardboard that was in no way relevant to his car-checking-off process. Thus is the power of MommyLove.

But sanity prevailed, and the Captain had to make due with a hug and a kiss instead. Poor little guy.