Sunday, January 1, 2012

So my new year just started off with a moment of sheer panic....But the story ends happily.

Our morning started off as most Sunday mornings do. Brian leaves the house to get to church around 8am (he's a pastor, so he gets there early and stays for the day, just like a regular work day), just as the boys and I are starting to wake up. The boys and I get up and dressed and they sat in their high chairs happily munching on toast as they watched Jeremy's latest favorite movie: Rudolph's Shiny New Year.

For some reason, I thought it would be fun to start the New Year by giving Jeremy the New Year's resolution of potty training! So we kicked things off with a bang and bi-passed the diaper and went straight to "big boy pants". I told him that if he needed to go, just tell Mama. Otherwise, I would set a timer to go off every hour and we would visit the potty then.

The timer went off, and I paused Rudolph to take Jeremy to the potty when he admitted that he already went in his pants. "I'm, sorry. My fault, Mom."  Well, at least the kid knows how to own up! I told him that I wasn't mad, and I changed his pants and left the two boys downstairs to finish watching the movie while I ran upstairs to update my Facebook status.... Yes... Five years ago today, Brian proposed to me!

Just as I updated my status, I realized that things had gotten very quiet downstairs, so I went to check things out, and I could not find the boys. Both the front and back door were still locked, so I knew they hadn't gone outside (plus, we have an alarm that beeps any time the doors open, and I never heard that). But they weren't in any of the rooms. I yelled, "Jeremy!"  Then a slightly more panicked "Jeremy!!!!" as I searched every room and bathroom.  Finally a full-on, sound the alarms "JEREMY!!!" And the house was silent. Not a sound, and it was horrible.

I realized that the one place I still hadn't looked was in the pantry, so I opened the doors, and both boys were sitting down hiding under a ledge. I immediately picked up Zachary and held him as I broke down in sobs of relief. Jeremy ran to us and held my leg, saying, "I'm sorry Mom. We play hide-seek." I hugged and kissed them both and told them that when Mama is calling, they NEED to answer. By that point, I had calmed down enough to wipe away my tears and take a deep breath, and Zachary looks up at me and cheerfully says, "Hi, Mom!" and holds out a half-eaten Oreo, he helped himself to while in the pantry. I giggled at the hilarity of it all, and decided that if ever there were a time to comfort us all with Oreos, the time was now, so the three of us sat on the kitchen floor, clicked our Oreos together as we said "Cheers" and toasted the new year.

Being a Mom makes me feel a lot of things ranging from pure joy to boredom, sheer panic to utter relief, exhaustion to energized...but one thing's for sure, it makes me feel so ALIVE!!!

2 comments:

J said...

Scary! I'm glad you knew they were inside the house. But still...so many accidents can happen, so when you can't find them it's terrifying.

Maya's almost 16 and has a teenager's sleeping habits. I'll confess that one day last week, she slept past 1pm, and I was debating whether to go in and make sure she was alive or not. I decided if she had died in her sleep, my going in wasn't going to help anything, so I left her alone. She got up about 20 minutes later. Funny.

Anonymous said...

There is nothing scarier than when we cannot find our children.
I'm proud of you for celebrating with Oreos and making it a good bonding time instead of losing your cool!