It's Magic! Or Not...

I have found a fool-proof way to find missing items. Guaranteed to work every time. Want to know what it is? No, it's not re-tracing your steps, meditating on it, going through the toybox, or sacrificing a live chicken. Nothing that complicated. The easiest way to find any lost item is...buy a replacement! The missing item will almost surely show up within 24 hours if you do this. I swear.

Two recent examples:

1) Last January, Shannon got a Nintendo DS for her birthday. A few weeks ago I asked her where it was. She said it was in her room, but that it was dead, as the charger had been missing for quite some time. I was not aware of this. So, just recently I was at Game Crazy for...um...something (Shhhhh!) and I decided to pick up a replacement charger for her. It was only $10. Went home, plugged the thing in so it would be charged when she got home from school. I went to work. The next morning, somehow, the old charger has made its re-appearance. No one is quite clear on where it had been (on vacation?), but there it was. Baffling.

2) Shannon is taking drum class in 7th grade. At the beginning of the year, we had to buy her a practice pad, snare sticks, three different sets of mallets, and a stick bag. The only cheap thing in this ensemble was the set of snare sticks, which cost about $6. Sometime within the past few weeks, one of the snare sticks went missing. She hasn't needed them for a while, because they've been practicing for a concert, and she wasn't playing snare. But now, the concert is over, and she has drum class today, and needed the sticks. I knew the one that wasn't missing was on my dresser upstairs, but the other one has disappeared. So, today I go to the music store and pick up a new pair of snare sticks for her. I had arranged to meet her in the attendance office at the beginning of her lunch period to give them to her. Went to school, gave her the sticks, even got a hug and a "thanks mom!" for that! I was happy...it's the little things, you know. Anyway, Kylie and I go back home, I'm puttering around the house (read: laundry, dishes, blah blah), and all of a sudden Kylie is holding a drumstick.

"Hey Mom, I found Shannon's other stick!"

Cue me giving her the hairy eyeball.

"Where did you find that? Did you hide it?"

It was behind her puppet theater box thing that she and Shannon made out of a TV box a while back. If she knew it was there all along, she's not copping to it, but I suspect that she did know.

Now that I write this, I think I'm seeing a pattern. Missing things belong to Shannon, Kylie finds them. Hmmmm. What a coincidence. Maybe I should ask Kylie where my sanity is. She probably hid it.

Have I mentioned how much I'm looking forward to all-day kindergarten next year?