Tough Glove

At exactly one minute before we had to leave for the bus yesterday morning, a boy started to cry because he had no mittens.

I checked his coat pockets, his backpack and the bin that holds all of his winter gear.

Zip, zilch, nada.

I sent him to school with two mismatched gloves that I found in his brother’s bin and strict instructions to check every “Lost and Found” he came across between the end of our driveway and his classroom.

Because I am not the sort of mommy who sends her kittens off without their mittens, I did some sleuthing of my own around the house. I grabbed my favorite “collection” basket and emptied both boys’ hat/glove bins into it. Then I reached under their beds, under the seats of the car, behind the washing machine and all around the garage entrance to the house – all obvious enough hiding places for missing mittens.

I emptied my basket on the laundry room table and spread out my treasure.

I had collected myself 15 mittens!

Seven pairs with one extra, right?

Nope.

Two pairs. With 11 (eleven) mate-missing single gloves.

The seven-year-old boys had managed to lose exactly one mitten or glove from each of 11 pairs in the 13 short weeks between the first of November and the end of January.

Crazier still, the crying boy had received a brand new matched set of hat and gloves the day before and COULD NOT FIND THEM, even though they still had the little plastic pokey thing holding them together and had never left the house!

Now, I’m no Statistician, but if you include the new set of gloves in the tally, even I can see that’s almost-nearly-basically one a week. (Which is, in fact, a technical math term. Look it up.)

That is a ridiculously high turnover rate for little woolen hand warmers, if you ask me.

My current plan is to just make them wear mismatched gloves (or perhaps one of their big sister’s extra pairs in some variety of pink…) but I will hold off on any major parenting decisions until I see what the “Tour de Lost-n-Found” produces.

Wish I could remember how the kittens’ mom handled it…