Dan Coleman's son Ray with his pal Big Bear

Biggie is back, after lying low for a year or so.

My 5-year-old son’s favorite stuffed animal, Big Bear, isn’t notorious, but like his late, great hip-hop namesake, never said no to smoked salmon. Biggie wasn’t lost or abandoned, just fell in our household stuffed animal Top 40 (how I wish that number were an exaggeration) from his place at the top of the charts — in Ray’s arms every night — to obscurity beneath the bed.

I don’t know the reason for Biggie’s comeback, but the truly amazing thing is how long Biggie has been with us. The floppy, pot-bellied bear arrived even before Ray, a gift from one of his beloved grandmas, and was the first toy he ever glommed onto. Many a spit-up, spill and misplaced sticker have sent Biggie through the wash, although he’s not as far gone as the bears documented in photographer Mark Nixon’s survey of items embraced nearly to the point of disintegration, Much Loved, a great checkout from the library for anyone fascinated by the mysterious and devastating power of a child’s attachment to a favorite thing.

Dan Coleman's son Ray with his pal Big Bear

Seeing Biggie this much again has got me looking around the house for other relics that have somehow survived the sound and fury of Ray’s first five years, but it’s hard to find many besides me, his mom and the dog. I can only wonder at the return on investment we’ve reaped from what has made it, a metric I’m in the habit of considering in my work at the library, where we calculate the cost per circulation of an item by dividing what we paid for it by the number of times it has been checked out.

If only library books were as sturdy as Ray’s indestructible blue sippy cup, for example. Not only has this thing been with us for as long as anyone can remember, but it also features in a household legend. When Ray was about 2 and a half, the bottle fell unnoticed from his stroller on a walk one day, only to be spotted several weeks later as we drove on a busy section of 19th Street. There it lay forlornly against the curb, and, more to see whether our eyes deceived us than to retrieve it, I pulled over. Sure enough, same bottle. Dented and gritty from a run-in with a car, it remained watertight, so I pushed it back into shape, washed it, and now we love to tell the story of its perilous past.

Perhaps the feeling of getting one’s money’s worth is at the heart of the satisfaction I get out of seeing that blue bottle –or the occasional phenomenon of reuniting all the disparate pieces of a toy from the piles of crucial but wayward parts found on every counter in our house. The kids seem just as pleased to see something like this come together again. Their attachment to an object they love, even if it can be had for less than $5 in the toy aisle of any grocery store in America, seems strangely at odds with our time, when we’re expected to upgrade our gadgets perpetually.

Or maybe my kids just come from a long line of people who like to get their money’s worth. I don’t know how many times I saw my dad cut out an uncanceled postage stamp for reuse, and my mom’s house is filled with well-worn objects, chief among them her trusty kitchen knife, which it’s no exaggeration to say has been somewhere near to hand every time I’ve ever seen her prepare food there. It was a boning knife from the small grocery store that was the life’s work of my grandpa, and the blade, once nearly an inch wide, has been ground down to half that at best.

I doubt my mom will ever replace that knife, but Ray is already too old for his blue sippy cup. Kindergarten roundup has made it onto our spring calendar; I wrote it down, although I have no idea how it got there. The stir-craziness of late winter exhausts our whole household, and one day I glean a deeper understanding of Ray’s sudden rages and impulsive physicality when I catch another, bigger boy looking out from his eyes, trapped inside a body and brain which hardly contain him. I wish tomorrow would come sooner, but I’m already nostalgic for today.

For once I will my frugal soul to plan for no deferred reward and take solace in a notion that the experience of raising kids is not a commodity that can even be saved. I assume great satisfaction in my grown children awaits, but I can’t help suspecting that, like a hike of many miles or a mountain climb, it’s really all about the journey. Soon enough my wife and I will no longer tend to tantrums, but artifacts, our home become a museum to childhoods passed. In the meantime there’s nothing for it but to grit our teeth, seek joy in the toil, and get our money’s worth from every tear.

— Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay-at-home dad, but in his other life he is a librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room. He can be reached at danielfcoleman@yahoo.com.