Lost and Found

 
St. Anthony has been keeping pretty busy over the past week as we move back into our home. On the one hand, it’s exciting to finally be able to enjoy our semi-new house, but on the flip side, keeping track of our belongings in a place with un-established order is beyond frustrating.
It started with the socks, specifically Frank’s. It would be obtuse for me to portend this tale with some anecdote about the sock fairy or the dryer’s appetite, so I will spare you the redundancy of another sock cliché. However, I would like to point out that baby socks are considerably more difficult to manage.

First: Babies do not keep track of their own clothing. Otherwise, they would keep it cleaner, need to be changed less often and be less likely to lose it. Perhaps they need some of the same peer pressure that teens face when it comes to their apparel. That would encourage babies to take drastic measures to look their best at all times (and maybe not spit up all over holiday formalwear).

Second: Baby socks tend to come in multipacks of adorable designs in bold or pastel colors. If you lose one with a football on it, you have the option of pairing the football with an orphan racecar sock or ditching the lone rangers all together. All white socks are a better option, but it’s hard to resist the siren call of hightop baby socks in every color of the rainbow.

Third: Not one company has succeeded in manufacturing baby socks that will stay on my boys’ feet. Perhaps my children are of the wiggly variety, though I have a sneaking suspicion I am not alone in facing this problem.

Frank has been found barefoot on multiple occasions lately. I partially blame our new Pergo floors, which don’t offer the friction carpet did as he crawls all over the living room. Over the course of two weeks, Frank managed to dwindle his sock collection down to two matching pairs, one of which was too small.
I was dressing Frank to go to his grandmother’s one blustery morning and could not find a single pair of socks. I couldn’t be an unfit mother! The boy needed socks! I needed St. Anthony! Then, I remembered the emergency pair I kept stashed in my diaper bag.
Since then, I have been finding random socks in closets, mixed in with other laundry, under every piece of furniture, most likely stashed by our cats. I gathered all of them into a plastic bag and finally played a little matching game on Saturday. Now Frank has more socks than the rest of the household combined.
Sunday morning, Patrick wanted to run to Home Depot before church so that he would have all the materials he needed to fix up our garage for storage. But, since we are still without routines or real order, he misplaced his keys. After scouring the house, and turning up empty handed, I said a prayer to St. Anthony. Soon thereafter we found the keys in a seemingly logical place – under a gym bag on the dining room table. Patrick had just enough time to go to the store while I got the boys ready for Mass.
But, as he left, I realized the front door was wide open the whole time we were looking for the keys. I knew both of the boys were safe, playing in the living room, but hadn’t seen the cats and began to panic that they had gone outside. I found one, Bailey, under our bed, but Jameson was nowhere to be found. I began tearing apart closets, shining flashlights under furniture, whistling, shaking treats, but there was no sign of him. When it was time for us to leave for church, I decided that praying would be the best way to bring him back to us.
We ran into my dad on the way in. He had already ushered and attended an earlier Mass, so he went to look for Jameson. After the first reading, Patrick said he was going to go help my dad. I was so worried that I found it hard to focus. I kept asking for St. Anthony to help us find Jameson throughout the Gospel. I had St. Francis on line two. Just when I was beginning to pray to him, Patrick reappeared smiling.
“He was under the bed,” he whispered.
“Didn’t we look there?” I asked.
He smiled and shrugged. We knew better than to ask when a prayer was answered. 

Catholic Review

The Catholic Review is the official publication of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.