The Wife returned from her business trip with a crick in her neck. That’s a “crick” like a sore spot in her neck, not like the proper pronunciation of the word for a small stream that’s spelled “c-r-e-e-k.” The crick is a nasty little muscle spasm that I suggested she put some ice on to help start breaking it up.<\/p>\n
So the lass retrieved one of the ice packs from the freezer and a dish towel because the ice pack is too cold to put on bare skin. Or, at least the Wife’s bare skin. The thing is that particular ice pack has its own pouch which obviates the need for a dish towel. The lass claimed that she looked for it and could not find it.<\/p>\n
So the Wife asked the boy to fetch the ice pack pouch. She even gave him very specific instructions: it’s in the freezer. The little 5 cubic foot freezer that is the bottom third or so of our refrigerator.<\/p>\n
Thirty seconds later, the boy was yelling back “It’s not there,” which, in hindsight, was totally predictable. Generally speaking, neither child could find air in a room, let alone a needle in a haystack or, more usefully, a pouch for an ice pack in a freezer. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. It’s not just for stuff that we want them to find either. They’ll misplace their own things and it almost always falls to the Wife or I to find it- which we invariably do in short order. <\/p>\n
Almost 100% of the time, the object turns out to be in a perfectly reasonable and obvious area where they looked<\/em> but did not see<\/em>. Once, I found a book of the boys on his book shelf in his room. He was flabbergasted and I recall him asking “What was it doing there?” The mind boggles. This morning, the lass couldn’t find her sneakers. She’d left them on the floor near the Wife’s rocking chair in our family room. The lass “looked” for them by walking back and forth between the foyer and the kitchen, swiveling her head saying “They aren’t anywhere…”<\/p>\n Returning to the missing ice pack pouch in the freezer, the Wife got up to go and look for it. I was busy re-starting the fire. From my spot on the floor, with a lighter in one hand and a starter log in the other (yes, I cheated this time) I called out to both of kids “I guarantee you Mom finds it exactly where we said it was.” The boy said “I looked in the freezer, it isn’t there.”<\/p>\n So, since he looked in there and it wasn’t there when he looked, imagine his surprise when 10 seconds later the Wife said “What was it that Dad said?” She emerged triumphant from the kitchen with the ice pack pouch dangling in her hand.<\/p>\n “How did you find it? I looked in there and it wasn’t there!” the boy cried incredulously. I can’t tell if he’s just really good at feigning it or if he really was incredulous.<\/p>\n “Easy, I actually looked. You didn’t. Sometimes you actually have to move things around to look for something,” the Wife explained.<\/p>\n “Parents have magical powers to find things,” was the boys response. “Something isn’t there and they can just magically make it appear.”<\/p>\n Maybe, perhaps, someday, he’ll figure it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The boy has decided parents have magical powers to make lost thing reappear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[89],"class_list":["post-4110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","tag-the-boy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4110"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4111,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4110\/revisions\/4111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sahd.lamafam.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}