Amaryllis sillyramA

I get a lot of junk mail. Who doesn’t? I’ve signed up on the don’t-send-me-junk-mail lists, but it still comes.

I do like receiving some catalogs, especially now that little M is old enough to play the window-shopping game: What would you pick on this page? How about this page? What’s your favorite? She likes to pick first, but then if I pick the same thing she picked, she frowns and picks something else. Or asks me to reconsider. I’ve tried to explain that it’s okay if we pick the same thing, but she’s not buying it.

Anyway, some catalogs are kind of fun. But the credit card offers I could do without. Years ago I used to amuse myself by shredding them and sending them back to the company in the prepaid envelope. No time for that any more.

Nowadays I usually receive several credit card offers per week, from various banks. But these all arrived for me on the same day. From the same bank.

Weird.

Months ago my mother took the girls out and got them easter dresses. Very pretty ones — and pink patent leather shoes to match. We brought them home and little M, the four year old, insisted on wearing her dress to bed, and I did what I usually do with objects that are causing strife. I hid it from her. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I also hid it from myself.

And I have been looking for it for weeks. And easter is on Sunday. And I can’t go to my mom and tell her I lost the dress in my own house.

I do remember putting it behind (or under?) something soft. I have been racking my brains, trying to remember where I was when I did that. What room I was in, what the soft thing was, anything. I can’t come up with it.

Places I’ve been looking:

linen cabinet
hall closet
guest room closet
corner of office
office closet
mound of clothes next to my dresser
top of big M’s dresser
top of big M’s bedroom shelf
mound of clothes next to my bed (yes, I do need better storage for my
clothes)
top of cedar chest
little M’s closet (used to be my closet) (we need more closets) (we’re working on that)
basement
laundry room

I’ve looked in all these places and more, multiple times, all the time feeling more and more frantic and ashamed. Yesterday I realized it was getting to me so much that I was taking it out on everybody around me. I mentioned to big M that I’d figured out what was bothering me, and bless his heart, he said, we’ll find it tonight. So after the girls were alseep we started looking together. And we looked all those places again. And we did not find it.

I dreamed all night about looking for that dress — and sometimes dreamed of finding it. It was not a restful sleep. But the finding dreams were very happy ones.

When I woke up, I decided to start by emptying my dresser, thinking it must be in there somewhere. So after making coffee and toasting a bagel, and dinking around for a little while, I set the girls up with an episode of Zoboomafoo and got started.

And I found it!
———————————————————-
transcript of chat with big M right after I found it:

me:
so, I woke up with a plan to empty my dresser, and the project is underway, but it has just been derailed

him:
doh?

me:
by which I mean, my incentive has gone away

by which I mean,

him:
you found it!

me:
:) :) :) :)

him:
where was it?

me:
I am crying with relief. I had dreams of finding it ALL NIGHT

in the dresser drawer, not buried too far down actually :)

him:
ah nice

me:
so relieved.

———————————————————-

…and I remain so so so relieved. I wonder if one of the places I found it in my dreams was in the dresser. I think it must be so. Yay dreams! Yay brain! Brain has redeemed itself. (LUCKY FOR IT.)

Little M pulled these letters out of a bowl and put them all up on the little fridge all by herself, undeterred by the two missing letters or the lack of space.

Ha, I suppose the title ought to have been Alphabe!

HAIL! We’ve had hail a bunch of times this week and last week. I love it! And I love the sunny then pouring then sunny then hailing then sunny then windy days we’ve been getting. If only it were warmer, it would be like spring! I can’t wait for spring!

Then there was the snow last weekend up in the mountains. It was really fun to get up there and play out in the snow.

Our place butts up against National Forest land. Seems like the neighborhood is less likely to get logged? Maybe? Anyway, neat sign.

PROPERTY BOUNDARY National Forest Land behind this sign

After our walk, Big M and Little M built a snowman family. No pictures of the finished project, alas. They had carrot noses, and excellent stick arms. The snow mommy had a pretty nice rack (or as the, ahem, bra area is known in our family, milkies).

Meanwhile, inside the cabin, little C was trying on daddy’s mittens.

And walking around all cute like.

Next time: Escape from Snowy Mudhole!