Lost and Found

Tommy thinks we left the baby at the allergist’s office.

It’s been two weeks since we found out our little one was gone. Before my appointment with the midwife that day, I took Sam to get his allergy shot. Tommy liked to talk about the baby that was in my tummy–he told everybody, including the medical assistant who gave Sam his shot, that a new baby was coming to his house.

We sat through Sam’s twenty minute wait, reading “Forbes” and learning how to get rich in a slow and steady manner. When we got to the minivan, I rewarded the boys’ good behavior with some Girl Scout cookies and told them there would be more if they did a good job at the next appointment.

“Where are we going?”

“To the baby-in-mommy’s-tummy-doctor.” Try to teach “obstetrician” to a 3 year old. “If you listen very closely, you might get to hear our baby’s heartbeat!”

That exciting prospect didn’t happen, of course.

So, in Tommy’s mind, the baby was present and fine at the allergist because we talked about our new baby. But at the next appointment we were told the baby was gone. Where did the baby go?

The baby must be at the allergist’s office.

Like a mitten that has fallen out of the pocket, unseen, it got left behind, forgotten until needed when a frosty day bites all your exposed parts. You hope someone found the mitten and put it in a cardboard box in the backroom, labelled with a black Sharpie “Lost and Found”. The next time you are in the same place where the mitten went missing, you ask about it. Maybe you are allowed to churn all the other left-behind objects around in the cardboard box as you search. You are amazed by how much stuff gets lost, and how many people are missing things.

Today I took Sam back to the allergist’s office, along with Tommy and Joel. It was my first time going back–hubby got that duty in between these two Thursdays.

I left no one behind.