Lost and Found

I know that every mom goes through this similar trial. We moms are no stranger to the phrase, "Mom, I can't find______." You can fill in the blank with almost anything. My shoe, my book, my french horn, the possibilities are endless. Why is it that only the mom is capable of finding the lost items? I have no answers to this question that I'm sure has plagued women back to Eve. "Eve, have you seen my fig leaf? I can't find it anywhere." Lately, our home has experienced the loss of several items that have given me cause to pause and question why. Why does this happen? Why are children and husbands incapable of finding things? Am I an enabler? Should I not be able to find something of theirs so they look harder? I don't know the answers. Tell me if you do.

A couple of weeks ago, my son lost his athletic cup. Not the kind you drink out of. He usually comes home from football and washes it out in the bathroom sink. Then he leaves it there to dry. It disgusts me so I told him, stop leaving it on the sink. Keep it in your room or with your football gear. It's time to get ready for football one night and he can't find the cup. Can't remember what he did with it. It's nowhere to be seen. I start looking. I can't even find it. This is unusual because I can find anything. The cup has disappeared into thin air. Of course now there is five minutes until football practice and the coach's motto is "If you are on time, you are late." So he is stressing...can't find the cup...no time to buy a new one...going to be late. He went to practice with a sippy cup lid protecting his testicles that day and thankfully he wasn't hit down there. We bought a new cup the next day. And threw away the sippy cup lid. What do you know, but the old cup was in the washing machine. Just where cups should be.

Last night, I was asleep. Let me repeat that. I was asleep...in bed...covers all the way up. Not trying to go to sleep. Not thinking about sleep. ASLEEP. All of a sudden I hear from the kitchen my husband's voice, "Jennifer do we have milk?" He yells it a couple of times and it takes me a minute to register that he is speaking to me. Because I was asleep. "Jennifer, I thought you went to the store. Didn't you buy milk?" He continues to yell. "The milk is in there. Look for it." I groggily shout and turn over. I was mad. He woke me up because he couldn't find the milk. I know it was in there. I put it in there. Then I couldn't sleep. What if the milks not there? What if I left it in the cart? I start to doubt myself. I toss and turn. Finally back to sleep. This morning I head for fridge to check out the milk situation. There it is on the shelf. It is behind something, but clearly it is there. Visible. To the naked eye. I'm pretty sure that my husband isn't blind. All my children have their sight also.

Here's another one...the cordless phone. We have three extensions to our cordless phone. One for the basement, one for the main floor and one for the upstairs. We are lucky if, at any given time, we can find 2 of the extensions. As I type this, one is currently missing. Earlier this week, we were missing an extension but to make matters worse it was off the hook, rendering all other extensions inoperable. There is no way to page it because it is off the hook. Quite the conundrum. I send the children around the house to find it. I don't know why I do that because they never come back with anything. Finally I get a brilliant idea. I send Emily to different rooms and have her yell. While she is yelling, I am listening in the extension that I do have. I can hear her voice getting louder and louder. We know the extension is in the basement. Then We do the opposite. Everyone is quiet and I start yelling into the phone so that hopefully she will hear my voice through the missing extension. It works! She finds the phone. It was on the couch in plain sight.