I noticed something fishy several days ago. Stephen's clothes were missing: a pajama bottom, most of his underwear, a different pajama top, socks, dirty underwear, several shorts. Hmmmm. I looked all over the place. I grilled him for an explanation. I even looked in MY dresser drawers thinking that maybe I had put clothes away too late at night. Nothing.
Several days later, Timothy's clothes started disappearing, one piece at a time. I started to wonder if maybe Oscar was trying to be a little sneaky by snitching clothes for Edson. (Just kidding!) At this point, I even resorted to digging through the trash to see if these pieces mistakenly (ahem) got placed in there. Still nothing!
Until this morning.
I was putting away the laundry this morning and went to open the boys' bathroom cupboard to put away the towels Oscar had been using while he was here last week. Out tumbled Stephen's jeans, his missing pajama top and bottom, ALL the underwear - clean AND well-used - socks, sweaters that had been in storage containers, the shorts, t-shirts and even some of Christopher's diapers. AHA! The clue I had been looking for! Christopher's diapers!
My dear little Christopher had been snagging clothes from his brother's drawers as well as the dirty clothes basket and had been shoving them into the cabinet under the sink in the bathroom! If Oscar had not been here last week and if he had not left his towels for me to wash this morning, it may have taken me weeks to find those missing clothes! Who would have thought that our clothes snatcher could be a little one-and-a-half-year-old "helper" who was doing what he thought he saw Mommy do: putting clothes away.
Case closed! All the missing clothes have been found. Now if I could just get him to tell me where he has hidden all my measuring cups from the kitchen!!!
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7 comments:
Gee, Martha, you could almost write mysteries. I was starting to wonder if maybe Oscar had an evil twin- and then he becomes an innocent bystander!
Seriously- it is so frustrating to lose things and not be able to find them. For years, I believed all the children's books about the borrowers might be true, because things would go missing and be found in the most incongruous places. And no one ever admits to moving anything around at my house!
And when everyone becomes the same size (or close, although none of us are really close to Taylor's size) they disappear in other people's drawers and closets for seasons at a time! Since it doesn't belong to the other person, they don't notice it, even when it is described in painstaking detail on a weekly basis. Also, we just discovered some of Gaby's clothes left here 10 months ago. I can't begin to explain or understand.
I'm curious as to who has been wearing Gaby's clothes....or why they were just discovered!
No one has been wearing them. I'm not sure where they were (possibly shoved between the wall and the bed in the playroom or underneath the bed) but I noticed them on a seldom used chair about a month ago. I kept telling Taylor to deal with his clothes and he did, dear son of mine, almost every time I asked him. But then I'd see the clothes on the chair and tell him again. I finally picked them up myself and saw Gabriel Caballero written on the collar. Because if it's not yours, it's invisible at our house.
I remember when Grandma was packing boxes for Argentina years ago at the kitchen table, and when she was done, we all went looking for the dish rag we had been using. We never did find it, and always wondered if someone in S.A. got a dirty dish rag in a box of nicer-looking clothes.
Boys have a hard time remembering where things are, or what they did with them. Roger still doesn't think he burned the trash can that we could never find again, but months later found the brown melted plastic stuff lying there! Oh, well, it makes life much more interesting.
PS--
I also remember one little girl wanting to help "wash out diapers" and put all the clean cloth diapers into the toilet to make it easier for me! That was the era before the disposable ones became plentiful.
For some reason, I always found our missing clothes in the ironing basket waiting to be ironed...well after my children outgrew them!
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