I love having kids. I truly do. But there are moments in my life as a parent that are only redeemable because I think "This is going to be funny later, and I am going to write about it." This is the story of one of those moments.

Kate and Dangles, January of 2010. Photo by Daniel Meigs

Wednesday morning, Kate, Isaac and I met some friends at the Sprayground. We had a fun time, which for Kate meant putting on a swimsuit, sunscreen and water shoes in order to barely get wet. I got some good conversation in with friends. Isaac took a nap in his stroller. Around 12:30, we loaded up and went home.

Two weeks after Isaac was born, I posted on Facebook about how we had attempted our first family-of-four outing and the process of getting in the car had been such utter chaos that we drove along for a pretty significant amount of time before we realized that while we had remembered to put both children in the car (Points!) we had failed to buckle Kate into her car seat. (Major points deduction!) Since then, we have gotten more of a routine down and it's not quite such a circus when we all leave together. Me going places with both kids by myself is still a bit of a work in progress. Leaving the house is OK; it's getting back in the car in public parking lots that feels a little scary to me. Getting Kate in the car first seems like the thing to do because then I don't have to worry about her stepping out in front of a moving car. But it's July in Albuquerque and our car is perpetually oven-hot, so then I face this weird dilemma of whether to put Isaac in the car too or leave him in the stroller, unattended in a public parking lot, while I start the car so the air conditioner gets going. No matter what order I do those tasks in, there's a pretty big delay between both kids being in the car and us actually leaving because I am loading up all our stuff and our Big Honking Infant Stroller. On Wednesday I got all of this accomplished, pulled out of the parking spot and realized that YET AGAIN I failed to buckle Kate's car seat. The good news on that one is that Kate has now learned that her parents are absent minded idiots, and so she goes ahead and tells me when I don't buckle her in.

We pulled into our garage with a few minutes to spare before nap time. Isaac was starting to fuss because he was hungry and Kate, who had lunch at the Sprayground, was saying she wanted to eat a banana in her big girl chair over and over and over like this: "I wanta bananainabiggirlchairabananabananabanana!" It was a little distracting, but eventually I got everyone in the house and settled with the food of their choice. Isaac and I were on the couch in the living room and Kate was in the kitchen enjoying her much-requested banana. This was the state of affairs for maybe ten minutes and then I told Kate that it was nap time and she should find her monkey. You know the monkey, right? Dangles the Monkey? The one she takes everywhere? That one.

Let me tell you a few things about this monkey. Dangles was a gift from a good friend of ours who incidentally is also named Kate. When our Kate was 10 months old, she happened on the monkey in a pile of stuffed animals that had previously been sitting in her room unused, picked it up, and hasn't parted with it since ... that she knows of. When it became apparent that she had chosen this monkey to be her constant companion, we did what several really smart parents we know advised us to do and bought a couple of backup monkeys. One benefit of this is that every few weeks I slip into Kate's room while she's asleep, put a clean monkey in her crib and take the dirty one out for a run through the washing machine. That's nice, because you would not believe how filthy a stuffed animal can get, but the real point of the backup monkeys is insurance. I am not actually sure if Kate could go to sleep without Dangles. I don't want to find out.

Photo by Daniel Meigs

In the process of buying our insurance monkeys we learned that Dangles, while made by a very prominent toy company, has been discontinued in the sense that they aren't making any more of him. At the time, there were still quite a few of them available online, so we bought two, bringing our monkey total up to three. Well, some time last year Dan and Kate returned from an errand minus a monkey. With no idea where the little guy got left behind, we were down to two monkeys, leaving us one backup in case of emergency. Which brings us back to last Wednesday.

I told Kate to get her monkey so we could go get ready for nap time, but she couldn't find him. No big deal. I started looking around the house. No monkey. I looked in the car. No monkey. I rechecked everywhere I had looked. Nothing. I thought back to the last place I could remember having seen Dangles ... in the stroller on the way out of the Sprayground. Maybe he got put in the trunk with all of our bags? Nope. Now I was starting to get worried. What if I dropped him in the parking lot? I went back in the house and asked Kate if she knew where she had put Dangles. No, she said.

Since it was nap time, I didn't have much choice but to deploy the decoy monkey, who thankfully was ready and waiting in the guest room closet. I just acted like I found Dangles, put Kate down for her nap and then got down to the business of seriously tearing up my house looking for this ridiculous monkey. Kate has a weird habit of hiding things -- usually small things -- in a few key places in our house including the pantry and certain drawers and cabinets. She doesn't usually hide Dangles. Still, I checked all her usual spots, to no avail. After yet another run through the car, the trunk and all of the bags we took with us that morning, I called the business office at the community center where the Sprayground is located. I am not sure I have ever felt sillier than I did explaining to the woman on the phone about how I needed her to go check lost and found for a monkey. "He's very important to my daughter, and I need to get him back if we left him," I told her. I actually got a little choked up, thinking that maybe Kate's little friend was lying on the asphalt somewhere because of my air-headedness. (Some day I am going to write a book about motherhood, and it is going to be called "One Thousand Ways to Feel Guilty." This will be one of the chapters.) The woman was really nice and took my phone number, but when she called back she said she had looked everywhere and hadn't found him.

Right around then Dan called to check in. I filled him in on the Great Monkey Crisis. We agreed that the thing to do was to start looking for a new one to buy online. Being down to one monkey just is not smart, since it leaves no margin between us and complete catastrophe. So I got online and started shopping. OK now remember how I told you that we realized a couple of years ago that Dangles is technically a discontinued item? Turns out they weren't kidding about that. Amazon had one for sale -- one -- and they wanted EIGHTY DOLLARS for it. I reported this fact to Dan via email and then decided that I needed to take a break from the whole situation. Lie down on the couch. Do some deep breathing. Over a monkey.

There are a lot of moments when it is a good thing that Dan is a much less neurotic person than I am. He calmly spent a few minutes checking around online, persevering beyond the initial sticker shock of Amazon, and found two monkeys available at much more reasonable prices on eBay. I have never bought anything on eBay in my life. I realize I am the last person on the face of the planet who isn't buying things there, but I don't completely understand how it works, and I am vaguely suspicious of the concept of PayPal. I mean, how is the money changing hands? Is this just the idea of money we're exchanging here? And why do I want to be giving total strangers my mailing address? I don't know. But I overcame my paranoia, got all set up with an eBay account and set to making my first and probably last purchase --- a stuffed monkey, brand new from a seller in Great Britain for about thirty bucks. Yes! International monkey transactions! Currency conversions! Weird mailing instructions! I navigated all of it, got a little congratulatory email from Ebay confirming my purchase and closed the lap top, rather impressed with myself. Crisis averted. Time for a break. I got up, walked into the kitchen, and opened the cabinet under the sink to look for a pitcher to make myself some lemonade.

And
instead
I
found
THE MONKEY!

Y'all. I didn't know whether to cuss or laugh. Two hours of my life. Frantic phone calls. Thirty bucks. Ebay. All because Kate put the monkey in a cabinet and forgot about it. On the other hand I suppose it's entirely possible that she knew where the monkey was the whole time and was just messing with me.

Maybe this is her way of paying me back for forgetting to buckle her in.