I Lost The Boy…
Uh-oh. Those of you who are parents will know this one, if your kids are anything like mine… You tuck them into their beds, you hear them chattering, eventually drifting off… you calmly go about your evening…
Later, you check on them, you creep over to their bed, you blink in disbelief, finding it empty, looking abandoned as if some giant hand has snatched them from the safety of their mattress… Your heart leaps into your throat as in the darkness you forget the tiptoeing around and crash over to the lightswitch…
At 2am, your brain mostly isn’t operating. Either you’ve been asleep and got up to answer a call of nature or been watching too many late night horror movies…
This happened to me. The common sense voice in my head, trying in vain to calm me, reasoning that there is no way The Boy could have just vanished, he hadn’t come downstairs, children don’t just vanish… I left the room to look in my bedroom, the spare room, under the beds, the upstairs yarn stash (yes I have one and yes I’ve found him snoozing in there before) the bathroom… I’d just used the loo, but would check it again anyway just in case I hadn’t noticed him snoozing…
Knowing full well that there is NO WAY your child can just vanish DOES NOT stop you feeling scared and sick when they are not where they are supposed to be. We’ve all read the BFG, and we all envision the most ridiculous scenarios when we’re scared. I checked the wardrobe, the toy boxes, the pile of laundry… and eventually found him, in the one place it hadn’t occurred to me to look, but made the most sense…
Looks like The Beautiful Blanket has another fan… and since he’s stroked it at least once an hour since he first laid eyes on it, I’ll be making another for his birthday, in a few days time. <3 <3 <3 For the story of this, my daughter’s 5th birthday blanket see here.
