The stuffed animal that wasn't supposed to matter

Somewhere in your house there is an object with far more authority than it was ever meant to have.

It is usually not the expensive one. It is rarely the one from the grandparents, and almost never the one that matches the nursery. In a great many families it is something that arrived by accident — a giveaway, a petrol station purchase on a long drive, a toy that belonged to somebody else first.

And it was chosen entirely without your involvement.

The thing about the backup

Every parent eventually attempts the backup.

You find the same one online. You order it. It arrives, identical in every measurable way, and you introduce it with a completely transparent air of casualness. And your child — who cannot yet work a zip — identifies the fraud instantly.

It's the smell, usually. Or the exact softness of one ear that has been chewed for eleven months. Whatever it is, it is not replicable, and the backup goes in a cupboard where it stays looking suspiciously new for years.

"We have two. He has never once picked the clean one."

Why it happens at all

Attachment objects show up somewhere in the first two years, and they do a real job: they are a portable piece of home, something constant to hold when the room, the routine or the people change.

Which is why the choice is so unsentimental. A child isn't picking the nicest one. They're picking the one that happened to be there during something that mattered — a long illness, a move, the week they started nursery. The object gets its power from timing, not quality.

That's also why you can't assign it. You can only find out afterwards which one it was.

What's worth writing down

Because this ends too, and it ends without ceremony. One day it stops coming in the car. Then it stops leaving the bedroom. Then it lives on a shelf, and then it lives in a box, and nobody remembers the exact week any of that happened.

• Which one it is, and where it came from
• Its name — including the version your child says, not the one you use
• Roughly when it took over
• Where it isn't allowed to go, and what happens when it goes anyway
• The first time it got left somewhere, and what that evening was like

That last one is a story every family has and almost none write down. It is invariably dramatic at the time and extremely funny four years later.

Small, and not small

It's easy to treat this as a cute detail, and it is one. But it's also a fairly precise record of who your child was at two — what they found comforting, what they carried, what they thought was worth defending in a shop.

The photos will show the toy in the background of a hundred pictures without ever explaining it. One line does the job the photos can't: not that it existed, but what it was for.