‘Never going to let you go again’
A LITTLE girl has been reunited with her favourite teddy bear after it was left behind in a Limerick city bookstore. On Christmas Eve, O’Mahony’s Booksellers in Limerick issued a Facebook appeal to locate the owner of a ‘gorgeous’ floppy-eared teddy bear which had been left in the shop on December 23.
In what was a fairytale ending, three-year-old Niamh Maher, from Bohermore, Ballysimon was reunited with Pluto after her mother Linda read a story about the lost toy on the Limerick Leader’s Facebook page.
‘On December 23 we had gone ice skating and then for something to eat at Marco Polo [restaurant]. We went into O’Mahony’s to get a couple of presents,’ Linda recalls of the day Pluto went missing.
‘We went home and we just couldn’t find Pluto. With the Christmas panic we just thought that it would show up somewhere.’
Pluto had been given to Linda by her mother Carmel as a baby shower gift when she was pregnant.
Linda said: ‘Niamh grew to love it and it went everywhere with us. In every photo, Pluto is in it and if you ask the names of who is in the family, Pluto is always mentioned.’
Niamh, who will celebrate her fourth birthday later this month, would snuggle up to Pluto each night and the little girl couldn’t understand why he had disappeared.
‘Each night when she was going to bed, Niamh would bring Pluto with her. We were looking for him when she was going to bed.
‘She takes him everywhere with her. She kept asking for him. She didn’t cry. I think, with all the new stuff she got for Christmas, that she was distracted.’
The teddy bear spent ten nights over the Christmas period all alone perched beside a stack of books at the customer service desk in the city store. Having seen the story on Facebook, Linda informed the store that the teddy was her daughter’s and returned to the bookstore where Niamh and Pluto were finally reunited.
‘Niamh was very shy in the shop, it wasn’t until she got in the car that she said, “I’m going to keep you with me at lunchtime and breakfast time. I’m going to keep you with me all the time – I’m never going to let you go again”!’ said Linda. ‘She hasn’t left him out of her sight since.’
The teddy spent ten nights in bookshop