St. Anthony

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This post is brought to you by the letter "N"...


St. Anthony, St. Anthony, look around.
Something is lost and must be found.

When I was a kid, we always prayed to St. Anthony when we had lost something. He is the patron saint of lost things. I always felt like he helped me find them. I remember the day my little sister's only and favorite doll disappeared. We had been playing outside and got called away to something. When we returned, the doll was gone. She had simply disappeared. We prayed to St. Anthony day after day after day for that one. We never did find her... her name was Mary Beth. When my sister went away to college, I got her a new Mary Beth to keep her company. It's almost like St. Anthony helped us find Mary Beth after all.

About a month ago, I lost my cell phone. I really lost it. I knew it was in my house, but I could not find it. I heard the beep of the failing battery one morning, but I was on my way out the door to run Gavin to daycare and was already running late. I figured I would find it after work.

That night I looked around the house and didn't find it. We really looked. We looked everywhere. We looked in all of the usual places. We emptied my purse, my laptop bag, and my coat pockets. Then we decided it would turn up if we just stopped looking. Afterall, we knew it was in the house.

The next night we started looking again. We figured Gavin had probably picked it up and put it somewhere, so we got creative. We looked in the garbage, in the kitchen and bathroom cupboards, inside toy bins, in the diaper pail (let me just say yucky, yucky, stinky - poo!!), in the fridge, and even emptied a large garbage bg full of papers that we had been sorting through and throwing out. We had it hanging on the back of a chair and were going through old mail, papers, etc and filling it up. We went through that garbage bag piece by piece and didn't find my phone. We wondered if there was any possibility he could have flushed it down the toilet, convinced the dog to eat it, or dropped it down a floor vent. We gave up.

The next night (three days after phone was lost), I pulled a paper bag full of leftover chinese take-out from the fridge and tossed it in the garbage can with a clunk... a clunk too loud and hard sounding to be just chinese takeout. In the bottom of the bag of take-out, was my cell phone - perfectly chilled to 40 degrees.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost my camera. It was missing for almost two weeks. I was sure that I had accidentally left it outside when I had been out playing with Gavin and trying to capture a few photos. I thought maybe I had left it on the front steps and the dog took off with it. I considered that I could have had it on the ranger and it fell on the ground when we took off. I could have had it in my lap in the car and it may have fallen to the ground when I got out. I take that camera everywhere, so it could have been lost anywhere. After almost two weeks, I found it in a coat pocket. Whew!

...and finally... this week we are missing the letter N. It's true. Gavin may be Gavi forever. My niece used to call Gavin Gavie-wavvie when he was littler. Somehow, I think he has outgrown that name. However, St. Anthony may disagree. He doesn't seem to be helping us much with this one!

I recently printed five large black & white photos of Gavin and framed them in mis-matched white photo frames. Each photo frame had a large letter glued to the top of it, spelling out G-A-V-I-N. Since I had printed new photos and was using some different frames than originally, we needed to re-hang the photos. The glue I used to attach the letters to the tops of the frames didn't hold, so last weekend, we decided to try a different glue to re-attach the letters to the tops of the frames and re-hang them. While we were working on this, Gavin was happily trying to help us. He was carrying around the hammer (dangerous!!), pounding the hardwood floors with a (bit-free) screwdriver, picking up nails and picture hangers, and carrying around the framed photos, glass and all. When we were working on the second to the last frame, we decided we needed to put a stop to Gavin's antics once and for all. We needed to give him something fun to play with that wouldn't harm him or anything else. We decided to give him the large wooden letter N. Harmless, right? What harm could he possibly do with the letter N?  He could lose it. That's just what he did. Now, he may know exactly where it is, but if he does, he sure won't share that little secret with us! He took the N, walked out of his room, and less than a minute later, when we went to retrieve it from him, it was no where to be found. He was pushing a John Deere (what else?) tractor around the dining room table with the most innocent look on his face.

We looked around. We checked in the couch cushions, on the dining room chairs, on the bookshelf, in the wastebaskets, in the diaper pail, in the bathtubs and toilets, down the basement stairs, in the laundry baskets, in the cat food, in the closets, under the couches, chairs, piano, etc. We looked in the kitchen cabinets, in the bathroom cabinets, in the dishwasher. We showed Gavin the letter "I" and asked him where the other one was. Cliff cut out an "N" out of white paper and showed it to Gavin and asked him where the other one was. We crawled around the entire house so we would be at Gavin's eye level to see if we could spot it. We had my niece babysit on Sunday and we asked her if she could find it. We asked my Mom if she found it while she was watching Gavin yesterday. She even vacuumed the house and still didn't come across it. So, Gavin is N-less. Yes, he may be Gavi forever.

I suppose I should just go to Michael's and buy another N...