Near miss!

Back in December, Steve and I got a "huggy bear" for Kailin for while we are gone. You can record up to 20 minutes of messages on it and then it'll play them back one at a time when the bear is hugged and another winning attribute is that he is insanely soft. I had a very perfect plan of reading her bedtime stories into it so that whenever she was feeling lonesome for home she could give it a squeeze and hear my voice (okay, so in my very very perfect version, Steve and I sat lovingly on the couch taking turns reading the stories so that she could hear either of our voices....not so much). Of course the perfect plan didn't come to fruition until tonight at 10pm when Steve had gone off to bed and I finally decided that it was now or never. Never almost won. Little did I realize that I needed two AAA batteries (inconveniently not provided). I was wondering aloud to myself about which something or other took AAA batteries that I could pilfer in this dire situation when to my delight I discovered a stash of them in the drawer. (delight is an understatement because to this very moment I can't think of ANYTHING in our house that takes AAA batteries - even most of our remotes are AAs) I gleefully installed them into the huggy bear and pressed the record button to test it out. Nothing. I removed the battery cover. I switched them around. Nothing. I stared in the light of the dining room at the black plastic battery case searching in vain for a diagram about how to insert the batteries (I had tried the standby of negative end on the spring, but as that wasn't working I thought that perhaps huggy bear required a custom configuration.). I cursed the store that donated huggy bear to the auction where we won him. I figured they knew he was defective and it was therefore much easier to make the donation....it was all a conspiracy to ruin my perfect vision (which of course in reality was not Steve and I sitting on the couch alternately reading the stories - it was me uncomfortably seated in the dining room on a hard chair already exhausted and now disgruntled...). Okay, so it turns out that ACTUALLY one of the batteries was dead - but I still like my conspiracy theory. Huggy bear is now happily recorded and I am off to tie up some more loose ends and redistribute some luggage into another bag (we're not taking any donations after all, but we still want to take an extra bag) and quintuple check that we have everything and then this tired mama is off to bed!! I'll post something wonderful in the morning if I have any energy. I'm not convinced I'll be getting much sleep tonight.