Marisela's Booster Pillow

I get to hang out with my Little Sister about once a week. Not with my biological sister, but with the one I recently acquired via the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program - Marisela, a 10 year old girl who lives about 10 miles from my house with her great-grandmother and her older sister. She is a great kid, with about 200 times as much energy as I have, and 200 times less ability to concentrate and sit still than I have. So we are very different in many ways, but we also have a lot of things in common. We both love animals, and dogs in particular. And we both love each other. That's a pretty good start.

Whenever we see each other, I pick Marisela up at her house and then we do something, go somewhere, hang out for three to four hours, and then I bring her back. In the process we end up spending a fair amount of time in my car. When we first met each other Marisela was very small. She was only 8 1/2 then. She has grown a lot taller since then, but she is still very skinny.

She has always opted to sit in the front passenger seat when we go somewhere, but she was having a hard time seeing out the window which was pretty frustrating to her. At first she tried sitting on her legs, but then they would fall asleep which made her giggle a lot. I liked that because she is so cute when she giggles, but it was not very convenient because she would not be able to walk when we arrived at our destination.

Then one day, she discovered in my trunk one of my dog beds which I had been carrying around waiting for an opportunity to deliver it to a friend. So she pulled it to the front seat and sat on it. That was a solution and she loved it and being able to see where we were going and what was all around us. She was disappointed when we had to deliver it to my friend's house and I had to promise to make her a new pillow.
This one, though Jesse is posing with it, was made especially for Marisela, to fit her specifications, smaller than the dog bed which was too big really.
And here it is as Marisela used it for many months. She still uses it occasionally, but she actually has grown so much that she doesn't really need it as much as she did originally. In fact for quite a while it hasn't even been in my car. I removed it when I had to pack my car for an out of town trip in early June and never put it back. So far, however, she has resisted my suggestions that we might be ready to donate it to a small dog. Of course, I will not do that until she is ready. Perhaps if I give it to her own small dog, she will be more receptive to the idea?