The Things He Carries - Part Two

I need to expand on my comments about David's attachment to certain items. Last week, I mentioned in passing the plastic fried egg from the kitchen set, but I neglected to mention that what we were carrying at the time consisted of not just one fried egg, but four fried eggs, two pieces of bread, a lettuce leaf, two hamburger patties, a bunch of grapes, half of a hamburger bun and a partridge in a pear tree. Actually, that last item might be writer's embellishment. Anyway, I smiled as I wrote the story about the powder puff because it happened several weeks ago and I can look back on it now with amusement. I was not amused, however, when we misplaced one of the four fried eggs. I was not amused because David was not amused and after spending about 30 minutes looking for it before bedtime, I told David that we would find it in the morning and surprisingly, he was satisfied with that answer.

Now, I was not completely convinced that we would ever find the fried egg because I had broken my cardinal rule and allowed David to carry his food items into SuperTarget earlier that day. We just needed to order a cake for Andrew's birthday, so I figured it wouldn't hurt anything. As I was looking for the egg, however, I remembered how David had lined all of the items up so neatly in the bakery case while Andrew pondered with excrutiating slowness all of the birthday cake offerings. What if we had left the egg behind? Would anyone even bother to turn a plastic egg into the lost and found? Would they laugh at me for even asking?

By the next morning, David had lost patience with me and since I apparently did not seem to recognize the severity of his concern over the egg, he decided to emphasize his point by throwing my crock pot--not the whole thing, just all of the breakable parts--onto the kitchen floor. It scared me and if David wasn't scared already, the gutteral, almost inhuman noise that escaped from me must have done the trick, because we both started sobbing.

After dinner tonight, David burst into tears just outside the kitchen door. After some inital confusion on my part as to the cause of the problem, I discovered that David had slipped a penny car into the hollow space at the very bottom of the Pella screen door, just above the weather stripping. While lying on the deck, my husband and I graduated from a tweezers to a steak knife then a letter opener, kitchen tongs and barbecue skewers and still managed to move the car from a few inches inside of the opening to about halfway into the door. David, with tears streaming down his face, ran inside and got a wooden spoon and a pancake turner and threw them at Michael. It must have seemed to him like they were the only kitchen utensils we hadn't tried.

A few minutes later with the help of a yardstick, we pushed the car out from the other side of the door and the trauma was over. Actually, it was over as quickly as it had started, car abandoned on the deck with David running through the yard. Much like he had suddenly appeared in the kitchen on Saturday morning with the fourth and much beloved fried egg. "Mom Mom, egg," he said nonchalantly and I will never know where he found it. I need to learn to let it be over as quickly for me as it is for him.