Growing Up With The Muppets on Animal Farm

“Oh, you’re an only childddd," is a phrase uttered too many times in an attempt to explain my behavior. 

Only children get such a bad wrap.  I mean, I understand why blessed humans with younger brothers to terrorize hate us so much. We (the only children) get everything we want, our parents spoil us and we never experience competition between siblings.

Let’s get something straight here. I still ask Santa for a puppy every year and parents do not spoil only children, grandparents do (give credit where credit is due). I may not have played tug of war over my favorite toy with a sibling, but my mom will be damned if you think I grew up without some family competition.

Enter Opus, my stuffed penguin (yes, like the cartoon, for anyone well-cultured in comics).

Opus Spaghetti Hughes- A Portrait (yes, I helped choose the middle name).

Allow me to give you an example of how bedtime went in the Hughes household. Well, let’s be honest, this still happens when I visit home. 

Ashley: Sits glued to television.

Mom: “Ashley, brush your teeth before bed.”

Ashley: Silence.

Mom: “Ashley, Opus is going to brush his teeth before you.”

Ashley: Still silent, sprints from TV chair to bathroom; finds Opus holding her toothbrush with toothpaste! Gasp! “Not again!” thinks Tiny Shley.

Ashley: “Mom! Opus is already brushing his teeth, no fair!”

Mom: “Maybe next time you’ll listen.”

Can I get a side-eye emoji please?

Of course I didn’t listen! This ladies and gents is exactly why I am such a fast sprinter: The Race to Beat Opus. Honestly, The Race to Beat Opus could easily match Olympic qualifiers with so many daily renditions. The Race to Beat Opus to the School Bus, The Race to Beat Opus to Make my Bed, The Race to Beat Opus to Finish Homework. Talk about Parenting 101: if your kid wont listen to you, try a stuffed animal.

However, I will say this also lead to my expertise as a wise-ass because I watched some documentary as a child about how penguins don't have teeth or they don't brush their teeth...well there was a time Cheryl challenged me against Opus and I, smart-ass Shley, said "wait, penguins don't have teeth; I win!"

Zing- one win for tiny Shley, one big loss for parents everywhere.

To elaborate, I did not just race a penguin; my parents would eventually pit monkeys, Bop and Boop, against me to get to bed first. Claude, the lazy lion, would challenge me for nap time.  Kitty, my cat whose gender we never decided kept me in line. If I did something worth reprimanding it came from Kitty and if I was sick, Molly my Irish teddy bear kept me company.  (She wears an Irish sweater).

So while other people have siblings and pets, my childhood (and to some extent my early and current adulthood) was the real life version of Animal Farm.

From Left to Right: Claude the Lion, Bop the Monkey, The Ops (all the penguins) and Kitty the gender fluid cat.

The coolest part (or weirdest depending on your level of culture and open-mindedness) is that my mom can do voice overs. You think imagination dies in teenagers; my mother is 29* (she's been 29 my whole life) and can throw her voice into Claude from the living room when I’m upstairs. I have to say people who hear her talent for the first time are often confused.  She created a full-blown personality for each stuffie and she can have an entire conversation among 10 characters in two minutes. My mother is quite honestly a woman of superior creative talent, and yes, if you’re wondering, my entire life-upbringing (yes, even now as I’m home on break from grad school) is a real life saga of The Muppets – her dream job.  There’s definitely a post on my parents, but just know Cheryl (my mom) was Seth McFarlane before Seth McFarlane.

My mom is a wonderful human and so is my padre, but I’d like to come back to the whole only children get whatever we want stereotype and my lack of a certain four-legged friend.

I asked my parents, grandparents and Santa for a puppy for a decade. I even handcrafted a wooden toy box and put a dog bed in my PlaySchool Castle. If that’s not determination, what is? By age 25, my grandparents passed on and I had long questioned my faith in the Big Man (St. Nick), so my parents decided to deliver, finally! On Valentine’s Day 2014, I welcomed into my life Walter, a purebred English bulldog from Hallmark...

Parents are too flipping clever.

This is Walter the family dog. Wilbur also loves bulldogs so Walter road trips with us - he's pretty low maintenance; doesn't bark, doesn't need to go out and pretty much just sits there, like a perfect pet, all day -easier to take care of than a Tamagatchi. 

Stuffed animals prove to be one of the best parenting tools in the Hughes household- heck my parents still trump my little cousins all the time with Bop and Boop, but the stuffies also taught me a few other lessons like how to be a con artist and the power of pity.

Throwback to seventh grade -- I amputated the tips of my index and middle finger at the Marriott Suites in Chicago. I wasn’t even staying there, just hanging with my cousins at the pool.  I went to change for Thanksgiving (because the worst injuries happen on holidays) and as I held the door for someone, I slid my hand into the hinges and the door closed.

So long fingertips!  (Don’t worry! They’re reattached.) Would you believe my greatest pet peeve as an adult is people who don’t hold open doors? No? It’s true!

After a long day of major nerve surgery, free gummy bears and sympathy from my parents and grandparents I got home in time to see what Grandma bought my younger cousins for Christmas.

And there she was, a big Ty Beanie Baby lamb named “Eunice.” Honestly what kind of name Eunice is, we’ll never know, but she was meant for my two-year old cousin Christopher.  After I carried Eunice around with me through dinner, held up my giant cast like a sign of victory and welled up my eyes better than Puss N’ Boots, let’s just say 15 years later, Eunice is in my parent’s office and not with Christopher.  

Sorry, not sorry, cuz.

At 12, I knew the infinite power of being the first grandchild or basically what life must be like for Prince William – the beauty of familial hierarchies, amiright Bill?

By a certain age, as a kid, you’ve got to know your parents will do anything to make you feel better. Why do you think they will drive all night if it’s the only thing that lulls you to sleep? Or give you a hug when you basically have the plague? It is not love, it is pity!

Life Lesson Number Who Knows?: Pity Panda

For me one of the greatest moments of pity was at age 18 and it materialized in the form of a very strange, yet plush stuffed panda.

My wisdom tooth surgery did not go well and to everyone who said “you’ll be fine” or “it’s not that bad” you (and Strawberry Yoplait) are the reason I have trust issues.  

Three days after surgery, my swelling doubled (it is supposed to go down) and well I ended up back at the doctor’s office. He took one look at me and said “you have an infection and need surgery this afternoon.”  This was four days before I was supposed to leave for my freshmen year of college (timing is everything).  I had yet to pack and definitely hadn’t had time to buy everything to make my college experience look like Pottery Barn Dorm! 

So my mother, gem that she is, triangulated the doctor’s office, to the hospital to the mall. We flew into JC Penny (is JC Penny still a thing?) and I picked out the most-drug induced comforter of all time – a vicious splotchy affair of pink and green circles.  Yikes is right. As we proceeded to checkout where gawkers most certainly thought I was a victim of abuse, I grabbed a stuffed panda and refused to let go.  Just so we’re clear, adult me on Vicodin is like a time machine- I revert back to a stubborn four year-old, need a teddy bear and strongly believe everything is fine when I'm high.

The panda was purchased; I walked into the hospital like “let’s do this thing.” After falling asleep to interns asking “is that the girl from the car accident, or the one whose boyfriend took a baseball bat to her face?” I woke up screaming in pain, but holding onto the damn panda.

And that, amigos, is the power of pity...or convenience, because I don’t think my mom could have convinced high as a kite Ashley to relinquish the JC Penny panda in time for surgery.

So folks, some kids are raised by wolves; I was raised by a zoo.