October 19, 2008

For the love of a “Blanky” (and some sanity)

And now a guest post from my sister....


Last night was our annual Halloween at the Zoo outing. With three costumed children in tow, we headed out into the darkness with our flashlights. My youngest son has long been afraid of the dark and “the mooner”, his newly acquired fear is costumed people. With Halloween soon approaching, he has a “love/hate" relationship with malls and department stores. From the cackling moving broom in the grocery store, to the scary witch statue that occasionally moves in Wal-Mart, he chooses to stay in the cart with his sun glasses on (apparently safer this way).

So, when it came time to go to a Zoo full of scary costumes walking around the in dark, I decided to break the “no blanky” rule and let him take his beloved striped blanket in his stroller with us. I am sure one can already calculate what happened. At the end of the night, we put the stroller in the car and within seconds of snuggling in his car seat, he asked for his blanket. Anticipating his request, I was already frantically scouring the back of the car for it. When my husband ad I realized it had been dropped in the Zoo. We panicked. As a mom or dad one can guess how a night without the “lovey” paired with his left thumb can be.

My husband spent the next 20 minutes scouring the Zoo in all the places we’d been. He chased two golf carts (with very fast Zoo employees), answering my three cell phone calls as I retraced my visuals on the blanket in my head, and encountered three packs of raccoons coming out of the woods. Needless to say, our efforts were in vain and we did not find “Striped Blanky”. On the drive home we retraced our steps with each other out loud and narrowed down the vicinity in which we may have lost it. After trying to convince my son that the “Puppy Blanky” was good, we put him in his bed. Thankfully he was traumatized enough by the costumes and the loss of his blanky that he crashed immediately. In between the cries for his blanket at 11:30PM, 2:00AM and 5:30AM, I plotted out my plan for this morning.

I will wake up, get some breakfast for my kids, and be at the ZOO by opening at 9AM. I will attempt to comb the Zoo in daylight once again for the beloved blanket with my new search parameters. I will go to lost and found with a current picture of the missing blanket and unleash on the Zoo employees until someone drives me in a golf cart through the Zoo until we find this blanket (o.k. maybe not the golf cart).

Oh… the things we do for our kids…. (I’ll let you know how it turns out!)

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