Olive has a number of toys—quite a few more than I'd expected her to at this point, because her grandparents keep giving her more—but for a very long time, she didn't really imprint on any of them. We specifically bought her a lovey that we really hoped she'd imprint on, but she's only mildly interested in it. There were good toys, and familiar toys, but nothing that she needed, that she was upset to be away from.

That's recently changed.

Not too long after her teeth came in, we made brushing a part of her bedtime ritual. That went well for a week or so, and then she decided that she doesn't like having her teeth brushed. These days, brushing is a whole-family event: I hold her horizontally like a football, trapping both of her arms. Christina braces her head so she can't twist out of the way, and manages the actual tooth brushing. It works, though it's a bit adversarial for my taste, and typically ends with a bit of yelling.

Before it got to this point, however, we thought that the reason Olive kept grabbing onto the toothbrush might be that she really wanted the thing, so about two weeks ago we bought her a decoy toothbrush: identical in every way to her real one, but we just hand it to her at the beginning, in the hopes that she'd stop resisting brushing.

It hasn't helped with the struggle against being brushed, unfortunately. On the other hand, she is really attached to her decoy toothbrush. She hates letting it go: the next part of the bedtime ritual is getting changed into pajamas, and unless she can snake that toothbrush out through her day-clothes' armhole and into the one in her PJs, she screams until we've given it back to her. She goes to sleep sometimes with it in her mouth, lazily chewing.

It is by far the toy she is most attached to. The little girl and the toothbrush.