Since we’ve had kids, we’ve had an uptick in the number of missing items around the house. The types of missing items has changed as well. Why am I always looking for the following things?
- The children’s toothbrushes.
- One shoe. I always have one shoe but I rarely have both.
- The remote control. It’s always been hard to find but it gets worse after the kids are born.
- Spoons. They disappear into the atmosphere. I had all kinds of spoons years ago and now I have a maximum of three.
- Scotch tape. I know this is the kids. They love that stuff and will make off with it in a heartbeat. I’m not really sure what they do with it. I probably don’t want to know.
- Paper for the printer. This is probably related to the scotch tape.
- Scissors. I took off with these too when I was a kid. There is some kind of weird attraction to these.
- I would add pens to this list but I was losing them before the kids so I guess I can’t hold them accountable for this.
- My smartphone. My husband has stuck to what is practically an antique phone so they don’t care about his phone. Smart move! They are totally obsessed with my phone and run down the battery so I can’t even call it to find it.
- Peace and quiet.
- My stash of emergency chocolate. They keep finding it.
Is anything else missing at your house?
Christa T. Palmer is a mother of 2 small children who lives in Colorado. She worked in the corporate world for more than a decade, but she was laid off the day after returning from maternity leave. Since then, she has worked as a freelance writer.
Remote controls need to be manufactured with a, um, loop as part of the plastic casing. So you can attach a lanyard to it, or an enormous fob, like, a brick.
I have at least 5 jars full of pens around the (very small) house. Now and then I go and gather up all the escaped pens and put them back in the pots, because SOME people in this house are incapable of EVER putting ANYTHING back where they got it from.
They need to make a TV remote locator, like the button on the base of your cordless phone that makes the phone beep when you push it.
Picture it: screwed firmly to the wall, a number pad. Only instead of numbers, each button relays a signal to the electronic beeper-fob attached to all the remotes, all the scissors, and a couple of pens. And my cellphone.
I CANNOT wait for a car where it opens when I put my handprint on the pad on the door. Ignition, same thing. Door into the house, same thing.
I wanted to invent this and looked for a patent online. Sadly, it's already been done but no one has utilized it.
Yes to scissors and tape! My kids go through at least one roll of tape each week.
Also, money from my purse! :-(
I have sort of a thing about tape and glue. I have a box full of every kind of sticky tape you can imagine. And another box full of many different kinds of glue. Hey, it's often been useful to solve a problem. I have more than one smallish decorative item been held to the wall with Blu Tack for years. The Blu Tack is a bit irksome as regards storage though – should it go in the tape box or the glue box?
Socks.
The socks are taunting me.
Tupperware. I have all sorts of mismatching sets now.
I have heard about these matching sets but I thought they were urban legends.
Only unicorns have matching Tupperware.
I think this would be a great sign for my kitchen.
I had to buy a new set of teaspoons a couple weeks ago. About a year ago, I discovered that Charlie was throwing them away. He knows better now (I think) but they still somehow go away.
And did he have a good explanation of why he was throwing teaspoons away?
I have noticed a lot of sets of cutlery are sold with 12 teaspoons and 6 of everything else.
Once again, I must point out that little kids are so damned weird.