My kids are always losing their stuff. Usually, just as we’re racing to the car for school.
“Shoes!” Tracey suggested to Miss6 this morning. How anyone could not know their feet are bare in this weather, I’ve no idea. “And socks!” she called after our daughter who was running back inside.
She waited hopefully by the car but knew it was optimism which kept her there, not any sort of realistic assessment of the situation. And sure enough.
“I can’t find them,” Miss6 called out from the house. “Where are my shoes?”
You know that expression Always in the last place you look? For years I thought this was profound. I remember in primary school thinking, ‘Why don’t people just start in the last place they think it could possibly be?’ It was only years later when I was briefly pondering the phrase it occurred to me the reason it’s the last spot is because you don’t continue looking after you’ve found it.
We visited some good friends yesterday who have similar issues with their kids. The were telling us about their little Girl4, who is especially prone to misplacing things.
“She’d been playing Barbie all day,” her dad told me. At four years old, playing Barbie is code for undressing all the Barbies you own and not putting the clothes back on them. “We’d walked over to check the mail and she took a doll and a dress with her, but on the way back she froze and told me she’d lost the Barbie dress she’d had in her hand.”
You need to understand they live on forty acres – their mailbox is a looooooong way from their house.
So they walked back to the mail box, checking in the long grass, then they walked all the way back to the house. It took a while.
Finally, they arrived back at the house and as they reach the back steps Girl4 squeals with joy and rushes up to him waving the Barbie dress.
“I found it!” she exclaims. “It was in my other hand!”
Unfortunately, Miss6’s shoes weren’t on her other feet or in her other hands. Nor were they in the wardrobe, the bedroom, the bathroom, the lounge room or on the balcony.
“We’re going to be late,” said Tracey, and despite Miss6’s protests she thrust an old pair of sneakers into her arms and marched her up to the car. “You kids have to do better than this,” Tracey told all the kids while Miss6 climbed over into her seat in the back. The shoes were the last in a number of straws the kids had been stacking up that morning – from dragging their feet over breakfast to playing when they should have been dressing. “It’s not like this is the first day of school for any of-”
“I found them!” squealed Miss6 from the back seat. “I found my shoes!”
She’d taken them off in the car on the way home last week.
Heaven help us.
Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his:
’BIG FAMILY little income’ Facebook Page
’BIG FAMILY little income’ BLOG
’raising a family on little more than laughs’
Lol! I used to think the same about ‘the last place you look!’
Suggestion: maybe it’s time to have a shoe rack or something (maybe in the garage) for all your shoes. And a box for school socks 😉 New rule: your school/work shoes MUST be put there once you get out of the car 😉
We have shoe baskets, shoedrobes and preferred shoe parking areas. The shoes aren’t the problems, it’s the little ‘darlings’ not doing what they’re supposed to lol
Our Master 6 is an expert at leaving his school shoes in cars… the problem is daddy will bring him home and then have to go to work at 5am the next morning with the shoes in daddy’s car…. or same, same but with Uncle Andrews car, or worse, in the forever travelling grandparents car… so far we have not had 2 pairs of shoes drive off at once, but the day will come I am certain 🙂
More frustrating is loosing one shoe…. I purchased a new pair in he hope we would find my 2year olds other shoe…. A week on still no luck.
I wish it was socially acceptable to send em places with no shoes
Send them in odd shoes. Just tell people your kid dressed themselves and you are cleared of any responsibility 😀