The First Time* I Lost My Child

So tonight after dinner, we were writing letters to Matt, like we do after every Sunday night dinner at the moms'. I stepped away from the living room to go to the bathroom and left Stellan playing happily in the living room. When I came back, I was planning on posting the last two entries you may have read on this very blog, but I couldn't find our camera/USB cable. So I scoured our room, looked in all the places it could have been, and then walked into the living room and said, "Has anyone seen the camera cable?" This led to a discussion (when and where did you last have it, could it have fallen out at ____, did you check in the _____, etc.) that lasted several minutes and involved everyone in the living room. Suddenly someone said, "Where's Stellan?"
It was at that moment that we all realized that Stellan wasn't with someone else, since all the adults were all together, and that he was lost (to us). Of course panic set in (at least inside of me), but we all remained calm on the outside. We checked in the living room and the kitchen, we checked in the bedrooms and the bathrooms, we checked out on the deck, but he was nowhere. We made sure the barricade on the stairs down from the deck was in place, and that he wasn't on the stairs. We checked the backyard, and he wasn't there either. Then Kevin yelled from the deck, "I hear him." So we all ran to the deck and saw him down below. He had apparently crawled out the back door, down the steps on the side yard, opened the gate that we had all presumed he couldn't open and then headed to the next door neighbor's front yard, home of the much-coveted tetherball. Yep, happy as a clam, he seemed delighted to see us all gazing at him from up on the deck. So he's fine, and we've all learned a valuable lesson: don't go to the bathroom. Ever.



*but probably not the last