Lost Items

I didn’t realize that one reason having children is so expensive is because you have to buy multiples of everything they need so that you can continually replace their lost items.

Edith loves to toss things out of her stroller when no one is looking, and inevitably on the rare occasions that I check our neighborhood Facebook page, I will find pictures of my daughter’s possessions. I’ve retrieved several in this way (including a very large doll which somehow escaped the stroller without notice and was spotted propped up against a road sign), and also her nanny says that the people who live along their usual beat are familiar enough with them that they will sometimes come out and return something they’d found from earlier. Also, I take a stupid little daily walk and I inevitably find something when I go: yesterday, for example, I retrieved Edith’s sun hat, which was down by the pond.

But now that Edith is taller, we are also losing things inside the house. She can’t reach the highest surfaces, but she can reach some medium-high benches and counters where things accumulate and she can also now open bins, cabinets, and drawers, and as a result, everything is missing all the time. We recently located a spare set of keys that went missing several weeks ago at the bottom of a hamper, so sometimes things turn up. But one of Edith’s shoes is currently in the wind. I know it’s in the house, because she came in with both of them yesterday — I took them off of her, and she immediately picked them up and started running around with them. Edith loves to run around with her shoes in her hands and hand them to me repeatedly in a bid to be taken outside, and I often have to hunt for one, but this time, it is truly not turning up anywhere.

My fear is that she tossed it in a trashcan that then was emptied without anyone seeing it there. I paid 45 fucking dollars for those shoes, and her feet will only be this size for another month. I do not want to replace them now.