They look but they never find

School and work mornings always seem to follow a similar pattern in our house. I’m pretty sure that they resemble many family households on a school morning. My husband and I amble around in a tired state preparing for the day ahead whilst desperately trying to rally the troops out of their cosy beds.

I’m not sure if mornings are easier now that they are all tweens and teens.  Whilst the 5 am wake up calls are long, long gone (thank god!) my kids seem to have done a complete 360 turn when it comes to getting up in the morning.  They were all very early risers as toddlers and kids, now it seems like they are surgically attached to their beds and won’t leave at any cost, no matter how late they are.

I digress, however, the biggest issue that I seem to face in the mornings is the ‘lost things’.

You know? Those things that you put away or place somewhere completely visible so that your little darlings can get there hands on them easily.  Those things that are often placed in the exact same place for years.  Yet, when it comes to someone else finding them, can they see them?  No, they cannot.

The male members of the house are the worst culprits for this and as my husband is just as bad, I do wonder if it is some genetic thing which makes them completely unable to see exactly what is in front of their eyes.

I even explain to them where I have put things and whilst doing it, I am thinking to myself that I am wasting my breath as I know I will end up having to traipse upstairs and find the ‘lost thing’ that really isn’t lost myself.

The worst thing is my younger son’s ‘air pods’ (not real ones as he would lose them and they are so expensive I would cry!).  They are in a little charging case and he loves them.  Like many teens, the world would actually end if he couldn’t listen to music during every available second of the day.  Having got through more pairs of headphones than the average person needs in a lifetime, I invested in these airpods to make life easier.  To be fair, they have lasted for 9 months which is a world record except for the fact that he is always “losing” them.  I think he deliberately waits until I am in the car and halfway to dropping his sister off when he texts me from the house to say, ‘I’ve lost my air pods!!’ This means that I have to wrack my brains trying to guess the many places they might be hiding.  I can usually narrow it down to one of three places; under his bead, under the bean bag in his room or in his jacket or blazer pocket.

If it isn’t the air pods, it will be his brother’s regular ear phones, they too have a tendency to disappear even though they are in plain sight.  He either rings me ten minutes after I have left the house or just as I am heading out, usually late.

But it isn’t just head phones that magically lose themselves.  School trousers are often known to ‘definitely not being in the wardrobe’ and when I open the door lo and behold, they have magical reappeared right in front of me. Other items of clothing are the same.  Having two boys of similar ages, sometimes some things are put away into the wrong wardrobe, yet they are screaming at me that their favourite t-shirts/tops/jeans/trackies are missing without even thinking about taking that short walk to the next room to see if it is there.

My husband is exactly the same.  With him, it is things in the fridge or the freezer.  I will say it is definitely there.  He can’t find it.  I get down there and there it is, it might just be underneath something else and not immediately obvious. Also he is forever ‘losing’ and panicking that he has ‘lost’ his car keys, phone and wallet. We have a middle sideboard in our kitchen which we fondly refer to as the ‘middle bit’.  Things do have a tendency to pile up on the middle bit but even so, the keys and wallets are usually there, it just takes a bit of effort to lift things up or move things around to find them.

So I am mother, wife and finder of lost things.  It is a useful skill to have even though I have to say it is just a question of actually looking for things with your eyes open.