2007-02-01
my quest for a mitten
|We have a sweet little pair of pink mittens. They're very cute, fuzzy on one side with smooth non-pill fleece on the other side. Yeah, the mittens have a matching hat with ear flaps that makes my baby look so adorable you'd have to look away for fear of burning your retinas with her unbelievable charm. I won't bore you with pictures of my baby. But I will tell you about the exhaustive search I have undergone to find the mate to that sweet little mitten.
We got the mittens and hat when our middle child was about 18 months old. Yes, she looked just as cute in the set as the baby does. So she wore them and then we put them in storage. Along came the baby and out came the mittens. Things were going well until I actually needed the mittens last week - when winter decided to show her misbegotten face around these parts.
Of course I was able to find one of the mittens. That one has been riding around in the minivan with us. It seems silly to put just one mitten on the baby, so that mitten sits on the bench seat, next to the baby's car seat. It's well-traveled, that mitten. But its mate is not.
I've had phantom sightings of the mate. I thought I saw it hiding under the couch. I thought it was hanging out under the crib. I was sure it was lounging in the basement. But I was wrong on all accounts.
So today, when I had to carry my sweet little baby in 11 degree weather into school to drop the other two off and then brave the elements back out to the car, I vowed to find the apparel I have come to call Crouching Cotton, Hidden Mitten.
It put up a good fight, that mitten. Along the way I found the fourth hand puppet I've been looking for. It's a pink princess and it joins a quartet consisting of Purple King, Brown Horse and Red Dragon. The princess was jammed in the bottom of a bin and has some dust and cat hair woven onto her fabric face. I thought I could brush it away, but it looks like Pink Princess is going to need some electrolysis after all.
I found the good remote under the baby's crib. I took that upstairs as a diversion while changing a messy diaper a couple of days ago and at the end of the diaper change she dropped the remote in a jungle of clothes, toys and new diapers.
I located the missing left foot Princess platform tennis shoe that has a pink ribbon for a shoe lace. Those are cute tennis shoes, believe me. One is upstairs in the older girls' room, where it belongs and the other one had gone missing. But I found it. It's under the couch in the living room. It's still under the couch in the living room, because I didn't need that right then. And what's the fun of finding things where they actually belong?
Our house is like a 3-D game of concentration. Remember that game? I'm sure it's still out there. You have a bunch of cards that all have a match. You lay them face down and turn two over at a time. You have to remember where the matches are to get a pair. Well, that's what living in this house is like. Nothing is where it should be and I have to catalog in my brain where I have seen something so I can find it later when I actually need it.
After a good 45 minutes of searching for that rogue mitten I almost admitted defeat. I had gotten into really arcane areas of the house (behind the entertainment center, under the baker's rack in the kitchen, etc.) and found nothing. Heaven forbid I have to purchase another pair of mittens. I'm sure the stores are stocking bathing suits now that it's already February.
In a last ditch effort I looked in the fabric bins where the mittens, hats and scarves actually belong. There was that little punk pink mitten - at the very bottom of the bin.
Of course Murphy's Law is at work here. If I would have looked in the very spot where it belonged in the beginning, I wouldn't have been able to find it. But because I did a comprehensive search throughout the entire 1,251 square feet of this domicile, that mofo was right where it was supposed to be all along.
The icing on the cake is that the baby refuses to wear them. She'll let me get both hands inside and then pulls them off. Like it's a game.
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Another overdue thanks: I'm sending an extra 1000 strides on the elliptical trainer to thedetails who added me as a favorite recently. Thanks Kat!
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2007-02-01 at 6:20 a.m.
