The Case of the Lost Sunglasses

Livia and a different pair of sunglasses when she was only 9 months old.

Many times, my day will start off ho-hum and things will just go uphill from there and my day will end great!  Funny how this morning was just the opposite.  It started off for me at 5:15 a.m. when I rolled out of bed, managed to make it to the kitchen and throw together a batch of oatmeal chocolate chunk muffins, get the kids dressed and ready to go, and have everyone in the van at 6:55 a.m.  We headed off to the dentist, 15 miles away in Encinitas, so that Isabella could have a cavity filled.  As we were driving along on our merry way, I was thinking how nice it was to start off the morning so wonderfully!  I had somehow managed to have a smoothly running morning, get 5 kids out the door and on their way an hour earlier than usual, no major fights or breakdowns had taken place prior to leaving, everyone was fed, and we were going to arrive to the dentist office ahead of time.  Not bad.  Once we arrived, everything went as planned.  The girls began to play on the indoor playhouse (thank goodness for a great pediatric dentist!), Isabella went back to the exam room and got set up with the nitrous oxide and her movie, and the dentist got to work.  I was hoping for everything to go quickly because we needed to make it 25 minutes back to Escondido and get Isabella back in school so that we could run Arianna to gymnastics by 10:00 a.m.  As we waited, I did the girls' hair in the waiting room (always a great place to beautify your daughters when running short on time), they played, and we made a bathroom trip.  It seemed like no time at all and Isabella was done, I had paid, it was only 8:45 (perfect timing!), and we were ready to go. 

Then, disaster struck!  We began to gather all our belongings and the girls gathered up their brand new sunglasses that their uncle had sent to them and had arrived in the mail the night before.  Only to find that Livia's darling lilac Dora the Explorer sunglasses were no where to be found.  I had seen them not that long before and was sure they were either in the stroller or the playhouse.  We checked every couch we had sat on, the playhouse a minimum of 4 times, the entire area on the floor, the bathroom, and the examination room to no avail.  We even thought maybe another little girl that had been in earlier might have accidentally picked them up and we asked the receptionist to keep her eye out for them.  In the end, after now running short on time, we had to leave without them, tell Livia that her glasses had gone "bye-bye", and head off to school.  

Now, logically, I know that this pair of sunglasses was only an object, a "thing", that could be replaced and doesn't hold a lot of actual value in this world.  But, emotionally I just wasn't feeling that.  I'm not an obsessive-compulsive person, but I was definitely having an OCD moment.  I was frantic in my search for these glasses and as I drove the kids on our way, it was all I could think about despite the many other peripheral conversations that I was holding simultaneously with the kids and the low murmur of the radio in the background.  I wonder sometimes why I have such dificulty letting these seemingly "little" things go.  In this case, I guess it really comes back to relationships, something that does hold real value to me.  I felt horribly when thinking of my brother, that this cute gift from him was so quickly lost.  I felt badly for Livia thinking that she might be very upset later on when she realized that they were missing.  And, I felt badly about the decision I made as a mom to let her bring the glasses along in the first place, knowing that 2-year-olds can easily misplace items.  Sometimes I'm very emotionally drawn into a situation - the lump-in-my-throat, knot-in-my-stomach kind of feeling - and wonder if it is to my detriment.  But, to feel is to be human; I wouldn't exchange that for a cold passivity in viewing the world go by me in a detached way.

All in all, the rest of the scheduled time panned out fairly well in the end.  Isabella was delivered tired and not feeling her best to school for which I also felt sad, but I thought she needed to be there despite recovering from her dental work.  Arianna arrived at gymnastics at 10:00 a.m. on the dot, Selah was delivered to school by Grandma on time at 11:15, and #3, #4, #5, and I all made it back home for lunch by 11:45.  Not a bad morning, all in all.  The lovely euphoria of the morning was unrecoverable, but after laughing at the antics of a very silly puppy and hilarious toddler (accompanied by a release of endorphins, no doubt), I felt that the day could be salvaged.  And, I'm still praying to God for a small miracle - that the purple Dora sunglasses will make an appearance in the dentist's office by day's end.