Beep, beep, beep…I found your hat

The weather is getting colder. That’s to be expected given that winter is around the corner. Still, it’s been a bit of a shock to my system.

So says the girl who wears flip flops without socks in the month of October.

Given how hot the summer was, I forgot how cold things will get in the coming months.

I’m not a fan of the heat. But I’m also not a fan of the cold. I suppose September and May are my best months of the year.

I also can’t get over how windy it’s been lately.

I had left some patio furniture cushions out on my front covered deck earlier this month in the odd event that one day I might find it warm enough to sit out there with a book.

After a recent weekend windy day I looked outside and noticed one of my cushions was gone. Now you have to understand, the men in my life – my husband and my sons – are a tad bit annoyed when it comes to my patio furniture cushions, particularly the ones on the back deck. I guess it’s because whenever it rains I’m shouting out to them in a panicked voice, “The cushions! The cushions! We need to get the cushions! Can someone help me with the cushions? It’s raining! The cushions!”

So when one blew away they were probably thinking to themselves – one down, 11 to go.

It took me an hour of searching before I finally found the cushion in the woods on the other side of our property.

“Greg! Greg! Greg! Greg!” I shouted to my husband before I finally received an exasperated, “What???” in return.

“Umm…I found my cushion,” I told him.

I’m pretty sure he filed that information under ‘I don’t care.’

One thing I am grateful for as winter approaches is now that my kids are older I’m no longer responsible for making sure they have hats, mittens and gloves when they leave the house.

They can fend for themselves. But I vividly remember what a hassle it was during their elementary school years – to the point that I actually thought someone should invent a tracking device that mothers could stitch into their children’s hats and gloves.

As parents we’ve all been there. It’s morning and we’re scrambling to get our kids off to school when the inevitable question is asked.

“Where’s your hat?”

The response is usually, “I don’t know,” accompanied by a shrug.

Rather than launching into a speech about responsibility and keeping track of one’s things, think of how much easier it would be to press a button on a tracking device. You’d follow the beeping sound until viola, there’s the hat!

Obviously the homing signal would have to be pretty strong since the hat could be anywhere: in their backpack, stuffed at the back of the closet, under the seat in the vehicle parked in the driveway, hanging on a hook in the locker by their classroom...and on it goes.

I had the “Where’s your hat?” conversation many, many times. The “Where’s your gloves?” question was also very well used.

There were days I would go searching for gloves. One day I find 14 gloves. (Notice you didn’t read the word ‘pair’ in that sentence.) No, I’d find 14 gloves that at one time in history were part of a pair. Now they were flying solo. Which begged the question. Where’s the other glove? Or rather, where are the other 14 gloves?

One day after sending my youngest son to school with two gloves, and him coming home with one, he told me, “I lost my glove during the second recess.” That meant he lost it about two hours after leaving the house.

I calculated I’d need to stock 1,344 pairs of gloves over the coming months if they were going to be lost in two-hour intervals.

Which is why a tracking device was the better investment.

Maybe I should sew one to my cushions too.