Riley's First Build-A-Bear

So we've been to Build-A-Bear more times than I can count, but Riley has never actually stuffed an animal herself. She has a bear from the time that Valen stuffed her one--when Riley was just a few days old--but she has never done it herself. Everytime we go into the store she gets excited to play with everything, but never gets into the idea of stuffing an animal. But we are usually with Valen who is super crazy at the store and tries to shove everything in Riley's face, so we thought we would make a trip when Valen was in school.



This is the bear that she picked. Justin tried to talk her out of it--he thought it was the ugliest one there. He liked the wolf much better.


She really liked all of the buttons and how they lit up. She was really into the whole process--kissing the heart, jumping up and down, rubbing it on various body parts and the like.


We thought she would spend more time grooming her bear since that's usually what she does when we go into the store for Valen, but this bear may still have had some unwashed parts when we left.

This is Riley at the computer. She was more excited about that then anything else; she couldn't wait to press all of the buttons.

Not a very great picture, but with all of the people walking by and Riley anxious to get to the gumball machines, this was the best we could do.

When we told Riley that we were going to Build-A-Bear she was very excited and insisted on going upstairs to her room and getting her piggy bank down. When I told her that she didn't need to get money from her piggy bank and that I had her Christmas money from grandma, she insisted that she had to get money. She came downstairs with a penny in her hand, and very carefully put it in her pocket. When I asked her what the money was for she looked at me and said, "I need a gumball mom." I wasn't sure what that meant until Justin explained to me that there are gumball machines across from the store and they always get a gumball after going to the store. I think Riley was more excited about getting the gumball than the bear, so in honor we named the bear Gumball.