lost and found

It was only lost for 36 hours, but it might as well have been an eternity. On Sunday morning, just before church, Caleb had been happily playing with his dolly, but five minutes later when we were ready to pack it up to take it with us, it had disappeared -- completely vanished.

I knew it was in the house somewhere, and I'm not kidding you when I say that I searched everywhere for it. Everywhere, multiple times. Caleb likes to hide things away in special places, so I checked all of his usual spots. I looked in, behind, on top of, and underneath every container, object, and surface in the apartment, even in places where there was no way Caleb would even be able to get to. I even fished through the kitchen garbage can (another one his favorite places to stash things). But nothing. Never had our 650 square feet of living space seemed so cavernous. That dolly was nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, Caleb was beginning the process to adopt Garrett's dolly, which, as you might imagine, Garrett did not approve of at all. The screaming and fighting over the one remaining doll in the house was beginning to take a toll on me as I decided to pull out all of the couch cushions for the third time.

I begged Blake to go try to buy a new one, but of course they don't sell this particular doll anymore. Knowing that it's unknown whereabouts were driving me absolutely crazy, last night Blake resumed the search, which had been going nearly non-stop since it went missing, in earnest. It couldn't have gone far -- at least, I didn't think it could have. My mind, by this point, had started to play tricks on me, and I was constantly second guessing myself. This missing doll was probably hiding right in front of my face and I was too worked up about finding it to actually see it. I even told him as much. "For all I know, it's somewhere on this bookshelf and I just can't see it!" I said, to which Blake responded by poking his flashlight in between and behind the books I'd already weeded through half a dozen times.

And then what should my hero of a husband pull out from behind the one stack of books I apparently didn't inspect closely enough, but Caleb's no-longer-lost dolly. He took it to Caleb, who had just been tucked into his crib for the night, and was that little boy ever relieved to have his dolly back. He took it, hugged it, gave it a few big, wet kisses, and sighed. His dolly had been found, and we all could relax and go to sleep.