Continuing to work on his 2nd grade research paper on Sea Otters, Ansel told me that people call them "The Teddy Bears of the sea."
In a sleep deprived haze last night, I debated the visual possibilities of that statement: Teddy bears swimming in the ocean (surfing! scuba diving!) or Sea Otters reclining indoors on beds or having tea parties. The options seemed mostly too insipid.
In the end, as usual, I took the path of least resistance and just put the two together. Speaking of insipidity, I feel like I have seen a lot of images online of animals snuggling with teddy bears. "Rat with teddy bear" autofills on Google above even "rat with tumor." There are endless images of dogs and cats clutching plushes. We like our online animals cute, and even better, cuddling an unrealistic stuffed animal.
And speaking of unrealistic, Ansel mentioned several times how great it would be to have a sea otter as a pet....If only we had room for an animal that is 4 to 5 feet long and between 70 and 90 pounds, plus a large salt water pool well stocked with tasty benthic invertebrates.
The Sea Otter on today's napkin is definitely not snuggling his teddy, and seems mostly annoyed by the lack of realism in the situation.
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