I went looking for a book that has disappeared, searching high and low through the entire house and strollers and bike carriers and backpacks and string bags.   No luck, but I did find a dog leash and my lost pair of splinter tweezers.   This is somewhat rewarding, especially since now I no longer have to dig cactus spines out of my hands and toes with a dirty swiss army knife.

I went looking for one of G’s flip-flops, and found my lost bike bell.   Searching for her fleece hat, I found it, only to realize that we had lost the pieces to one of Alana’s puzzles.   I quested after G’s sunglasses, and returned with 2 pair, but wondered what happened to her blinky superball .   And I found another dog leash.

G and Alana have no clue whatsoever where they put things.   Even when things don’t technically “get lost,” they are dropped with such random who-gives-a-shittedness that they are, for all intents and purposes, functionally missing long before a formal Search & Rescue mission is undertaken.   This means that I am now responsible for the varied possessions of 3 people.

I rarely lose things.   A point of training early in my Ultimate career was: never get separated from your stuff.   Along with always carry extra toilet paper, this is doctrine for me.   But resources are finite, and the added burden of 2 tinyHumans is causing cracks in my foundation.   Last week I left a water bottle at an Intro to Avy seminar at REI.   Today I left my favorite hat at the gym.

This trend bothers me, because I am cheap, sentimental, and horrified by its further reflection of my loss of control.   No matter how much you try to stay on top of kids’ stuff, you are always hunting for it, and all the explanations in the world can not keep me from feeling addled and too-late, like a dumb stoner, except I always know where my dugout is, proving that parenthood is actually worse for your short-term memory than pot.

Losses and misplacings only get more complex with sets.   Socks – so many cute ones living as widows and orphans, where even if their mates are alive, they may be mixed in with the other age group.   Every once in a while G puts on a sock that barely passes her toes, or Alana gets an enormous leg-warmer.   Socks are lucky to at all be found amidst the bottomless pile of pastel-colored laundry, that I can fold and sort for hours and never make a dent in the total number or volume of items.

Toy groupings are by far the worst, as G has a genuine emotional attachment to some of her toys, and apparently the toys have emotional attachments to each other.   Stuffed Kila, Mommy Dog, and Granny Dog were grief-stricken when Baby Dog could not be found, their sorrow so devastating it nearly prevented our trip to the park.   Baby Dinosaur was missing for almost a week, and even after both G and Mommy Dinosaur had turned the page, I alone held out hope, eventually finding it in her cubby at daycare.   She brought Baby Dinosaur into school again today with her, it really needs a buddy-system.   Apparently I am its buddy.