I lost the toddler the other day. We finished the grocery shopping and then parked ourselves in a goodwill shop to sort through children’s books. Almost nothing but shit on their shelves unfortunately and definitely not worth the trouble that followed. I thought Cormac was pottering about with us near the shopping trolley but when I got up from the piles of books on the floor to look he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t anywhere in the shop either.
Stay right here, I barked at Lauca, pointing to the shopping trolley and my purse as I ran out of the shop. I looked, nothing, not a toddler in sight. I weighed up in my mind – car park or shops, run over or abducted? I was just about to begin some panic-stricken shouting when a Montessori mother materialised and clutched my arm laughing.
I thought I recognised that toddler, she said. Where, I asked urgently, not quite ready to move from terror to hilarity. She pointed towards the supermarket where we had not long finished the grocery shopping. Cormac, looking very pleased with himself, was toddling out of the supermarket and back to the goodwill shop with packets of shoplifted pikelets swinging from both hands.
My question is this, when parenting of this low quality occurs why is there always a school mother around to witness it?
blue milk 
My question is, where was the store detective? Does “under the radar” have special meaning here?
Also – just because…
Oh, don’t beat yourself up. It happens to all of us at some stage. Fred once took off at the age of 2ish at Prahran market, taking a crawling baby with her. There were about 10 adults present watching the kids. I was very embarrassed that Fred managed to kidnap a baby who couldn’t even walk (actually looking back on the scenario now, and knowing Fred better than I did then, I think it’s quite possible that the crawler actually took off and Fred, concerned for his wellbeing, followed. She’s always underestimated the capacity of adults to actually be useful in any way).
OH
GOD
I think I would die of panicking.
I’m glad things turned out ok!
(we went shoe shopping today and Niko was enchanted with a little girl’s (six years old?) jewelry. he marched up to her and started grabbing at it, a long string of beads and a slender delicate looking gold chain with a small gold saint’s medallion. personal space? mugging? what are THOSE concepts?)
Haha at least you can tell that story at his twenty first! I lost Chloe in Target once and she went to the lady at the front and said “Can you please find my mum her name is Katy and she’s really bad at playing hide and seek” – then when we walked out she had lifted a bracelet. It took me a year to go back there.
I remember many times my mum was surprisingly puffed singing “Back to the car sweetie!” Don’t feel bad. I love that he got an idea in his head and went about getting it done, swifty fingers. And picklets! what choice!
When I was 12 my mum was treated badly by a checkout clerk. She was so angry she drove right by me as I waited for her at the video store. She was 20mins down the road, in the next country town, before she remembered she’d brought me shopping. Then *I* was really angry. 😀
We were routinely left at school and stores and resteraunts, but the one that tops it was my young self wandering around a funeral after everyone went home. Open coffin. Ayuuuuup.
Glad everything turned out okay for you guys, regardless of who witnessed it or not! 🙂
My youngest had the disappearing act down to a fine art, unless you were physically hanging on to him all it took was looking the other way for 30 seconds and BAM, he was gone. One of the more memorable incidents was at Manly on the crowded harbour beachfront, it took just that little too long for comfort for us to remember his obsession with a seashell sculpture that kids can climb on before we found him there. It took quite some adjusting to as the first two kids had very short virtual leashes and would never have gone off without me.
My husband lost our 3yr old for over an hour in a shopping centre while at a birthday party my eldest was attending. Not just one school parent, but half a dozen. The whole school knew about the incident before the bell rang Monday morning. 🙂
I’d question his taste though, those supermarket pikelets are usually awful!
oh, yeah
that’s a horrible feeling
know it well
we recently had a similar incident in Cairns airport
nice
I’m usually terrible and don’t comment on things even when I enjoy reading (as I do your blog) but as a child I was rather an escape artist so I thought I’d offer my sympathies!
My favourite method was to vanish in the supermarket, turn a corner, and then start bawling so the shop staff would give me sweets until my mother tracked me down.
The worst thing I ever did was at about 6 or 7, disappearing in a crowded shopping centre, on Christmas Eve, a week or so after a highly publicised abduction in the area…
I’m sure the other mother will have been in the same circumstances, and good luck keeping track of the kid as he becomes increasingly mobile and sneaky!
All I can say is that toddlers do that.
The part where a mother who knows you saw the incident was just Murphy’s Law.
Our neighbour returned our four year old yesterday, after she saw her wandering down our road and onto a busier rural road. Miss Four said she was looking for Daddy. She got further than her brother did at age three when I spotted him from our verandah ( I was eight and a bit months pregnant and could not run) riding his tricycle down our road. He was at the neighbours gate by the time his Dad caught up with him. He was going into town (5kms) to get the paper. I have also caught up with him at the mailbox and had to assure a worried passerby (in a car, heart stopped when the car stopped) that we was in fact mine. Luckily he confirmed this. He, now seven, is getting more sensible, Miss Four seems to be going through a silly stage and doesn’t ever seem to think that she is lost, but that she has to find us.
I know that cold hard feeling in my heart as I search for a missing kid. You poor thing.
Did you keep the pikelets?
Only a few days after we returned to Australia after living in the UK for a while, my sister dropped by and we got chatting. After a while we realised that we hadn’t heard my two kids for a while, and then I noticed that the flyscreen off our living room picture window had been pushed out. The kids had gone exploring (probably sprog the younger leading the way, and sprog the elder trying to keep an eye on her).
Sister and I erupted out of the front door to check the neighbourhood just as the notorious teen gang from two streets away were turning the corner leading two toddlers with very full and pongy nappies (just to complete the appearance of complete parental negligence) back to our house (apparently our two had only got to one street away before the teens found them, but still).
More robust fastenings to those flyscreens were rapidly installed.
I’m sorry, but I laughed uproariously.
Far better shoplifting than running out to the carpark and loading area to admire a forklift in action up close.
A family friend of ours used to escape from his bedroom as a toddler – he was returned home by the police (the station was on their street) several times.
I’m glad he didn’t head for the street, and I’m sure the other mother has been in the same boat.
Back in the day when we had a local pool, BEFORE IT WAS DEMOLISHED FOR APARTMENTS, now let’s not get angry and derail the thread Helen… Boy (two-ish) and Girl (seven-ish) were in the shallow end of the middle pool, where Boy could stand, and Girl was doing the Look at meLookatmeMumMumLookatme thing, and I did one of my constant swivels to check on Boy only to find Boy not there. Ran round all the pools with that cold hard feeling in my heart – thanks Kris – to eventually find Boy happily floating at the *deep* end of the *big people’s* pool, holding onto the ladder with one hand. Pool attendants happily oblivious.
Another time the whole neighbourhood was out looking for him in the bush park next to our house (The CREEK!!!) then I found him curled up asleep in his bed.
Such an awful feeling! My mother was found playing on the train tracks at the end of her street when she was 3.
My question is this, why did the school mother not stop Cormac? I agree though, these things always seem to happen in front of school mothers, inlaws, work colleagues and the like.
I would have been freaking out!!
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