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This week we have an incredibly helpful piece from clean person extraordinaire Jolie Kerr about how to wash your children’s beloved stuffed animals. Each of my kids has a veritable army of special stuffies: My older daughter loves owls, my little one loves cats. So instead of just one V.I.P. animal to keep track of, my big girl can’t fall asleep unless Fluffy; Fluffy’s daughters, Pinkie Pie and Blueberry; Fluffy’s sister, Fluffy 2; and Fluffy 2’s daughter Bravey are all present and accounted for in her bed.

I have scuffed up many sets of plastic eyes because I was not laundering these owls properly after they got smelly from overuse, dropped in mud or barfed on. Thanks to Jolie’s expertise, I now realize that I should have been sticking all these gals in a garment bag before dumping them in the washing machine.

While spot-cleaning Blueberry is not my favorite activity, I know that favored stuffed animals have a profound importance to our kids, and can help them cope in times of stress. Our children’s most obsessed-over toys and blankets are called “transitional objects,” a term coined in 1951 by the pioneering British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, after he observed that babies often became “addicted” to a particular special soft toy, which was “affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated.”